“Out of the Way”: Property and the Subversive Construction of Space by Enslaved People in the American South
By Hannah Swartos
Abstract
The accumulation of edible and material property by enslaved individuals is recognized by historians and archaeologists as an act of radical subsistence and profound, everyday resistance. Used as a container for property, the subfloor pit in slave quarter architecture created a space for both individual and communal autonomy within the oppressive environment of enslavement. The structure is therefore a valuable contribution to the study of such complicated topics as ownership, privacy, and visibility in the slave quarter, adding both physical and social dimensions to the resulting complexities of property possession. Vulnerable to surveillance by patrols and enslavers, and often used in multi-family households, subfloor pits could hardly be considered "private" but nonetheless offered practical, communal, and individual value to the routines of enslaved individuals and families. In the floors of their dwellings, enslaved people constructed a physical and social underground within the landscapes of power and resistance on American plantations.
Keywords
Slave resistance, slave property, plantation architecture, archaeology of slavery
Introduction
The literature on African American history experienced a fundamental and necessary expansion when the historical community recognized resistance as a prominent component of enslaved life in the American South. Following the publication of works such as Herbert Aptheker’s 1943 book American Negro Slave Revolts, and largely in response to John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, dominant historical depictions began to move away from portrayals of enslaved people as “the generally contented, racially inferior subjects of paternalistic planters [plantation owners]” (Shapiro 53). An initial focus on active and armed forms of resistance was soon accompanied by a growing interest in the domestic quarters as the setting for more nuanced and subtle forms of subversion. In particular, the accumulation of edible and material property has now been recognized as one of the most crucial components of subversion and autonomous action by enslaved people (Morgan, Penningroth). Property, whether crafted, cultivated, or traded, could feed a family, transform personal routines, and foster an expansive and dynamic economy within enslaved communities.
To accommodate and encourage property acquisition, enslaved people merged a series of time and space manipulations with complex social ties and exchanges, of which the subfloor pit is one result. The subfloor pit is the literal underground, a quasi-hidden and often subversive space functioning effectively beneath the extremely regulated and surveilled environment of the slave quarters. Enmeshed within the subversive domestic landscape and embedded beneath the charged architectural framework of enslavement, the subfloor pit emerges as both a critical accessory to means of property accumulation as well as a contributing discussion point for the study of such complicated topics as ownership, privacy, and visibility within the slave quarter. The practices of property accumulation among enslaved people and the social implications of such practices are remarkable in themselves, but the subfloor pit adds another layer to the resulting complexities of property possession by enslaved people. As containers for the products of acquired and cultivated property, subfloor pits occupied a unique position within the so-called “geography of resistance” (LaRoche 87), functioning almost completely out of view below ground, within the subtleties of the slave quarter.
To situate shallow holes in the ground within discussions of power upheaval and subversion may appear overly emphatic, presenting a seemingly unlikely addition to the discourse on the resistance of enslaved people. Through the construction of subfloor pits, however, enslaved people solidified the slave quarter as a prominent environment of resistance against an oppressively constructed and regulated architectural setting. In Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery, John Michael Vlach argues that enslavers used the architecture of the slave quarters not only to house their workforce but also to reinforce bondage as the primary characteristic of African American identity through a regulated and restricted manner of living for those enslaved (165). By constructing a more personalized structure within an imposing space, enslaved people acted in opposition to this attempt at environmental and psychological regulation.
Philosopher Henri Lefebvre speaks to the construction of abstract space in the capitalist landscape in his article, “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” but his sentiments apply well to the concrete landscape of slave architecture. He writes, “To change life means nothing if there is no production of an appropriated space” (Lefebvre 186). The social dynamics inherent to the nature of space result in assigned spatial constructs, “administratively controlled and even . . . policed” (Lefebvre 186) by hegemonic powers. In an attempt to disrupt such constructs and upset the weighted balance of enslaved-enslaver negotiations and power shifts, enslaved people added an accompanying structure to autonomous practices of property acquisition through the construction and use of subfloor pits. As assistants to and containers for methods of subsistence, subfloor storage areas reflect attempts by enslaved people to infuse the domestic environment with autonomy, personal choice, and community organization, elevating the subfloor pit to a deserved place among broader landscapes of resistance.
As assistants to and containers for methods of subsistence, subfloor storage areas reflect attempts by enslaved people to infuse the domestic environment with autonomy, personal choice, and community organization, elevating the subfloor pit to a deserved place among broader landscapes of resistance.
Property Accumulation in the Slave Quarter
Historians such as Philip Morgan and Dylan Penningroth have created a body of work that places the acquisition of property by enslaved people at the forefront of autonomous practice and resistance. Integral to this study is an analysis of the conditions that allowed for property ownership among enslaved people as well as those that made the procurement and storage of property extraordinarily difficult. Property included edible produce and raised animals, but also extended to material goods acquired through craftsmanship, trade, or theft. Enslaved people were not legally permitted to own property, but property accumulation in the slave quarter nonetheless instigated a complex series of social relations and autonomous activity (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk 107). To an extent, many plantation owners even allowed their enslaved workers to accumulate certain material goods and rarely exercised their legal right to claim the property of those enslaved. Hercules LeCount, a formerly enslaved man, argued that his previous enslaver “did not own or even claim a cent’s worth of . . . [his property]” while Henry Stephens, another enslaved man, “never heard of a master’s claiming property that belonged to his slaves” (Morgan 410). The proliferation of property ownership by enslaved people shaped what scholars have labeled the “internal economy” of enslavement (Berlin and Morgan 3).
Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan identify two prominent and interrelated economies within the system of enslavement: “one organized by and for the master, although contested and constrained by the slaves; the other by and for the slaves, although contested and constrained by the masters” (Berlin and Morgan 2). To be sure, the developing internal economy among enslaved individuals was subjected to the constraints of environment and condition, and planters exerted control over this aspect of enslaved life to the extent that they were able; yet, despite restrictive conditions, enslaved people continued to grow this “internal economy” by way of trade, cultivation, and craftsmanship within and between individual enslaved communities. Outside of, or rather, alongside and between the work they were forced to do, enslaved people built a functioning and dynamic system of trade and production that became a foundational component of their evolving culture.
The economy of the “in between” was accompanied by an “underneath,” a space in which material items and food were stored in a semi-secluded fashion by enslaved people. Artifact and botanical assemblages have often been found in subfloor pits during archaeological excavations, but, as Patricia Samford outlines in her book, Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia, determining their use and context is difficult. Presumably, if material property was valuable to an individual or family, the odds of it being left behind in a pit are unlikely, except perhaps in the case of an emergency, such as a fire (Samford, Subfloor Pits 142). This is the prominent, paradoxical issue in relying on archaeological evidence to support the storage of property in subterranean storage structures: “the very nature of using a subfloor pit for storage of personal possessions hinders the ability of archaeologists to definitively assign this function through artifact analysis in most instances” (Samford, Subfloor Pits 142). Interpreting food remains holds similar difficulties; it is difficult to determine whether remains or items were stored in pits intentionally or tossed in as refuse.
Archaeological evidence of stored property must therefore rely on additional primary support. Though narrative evidence of material property storage is limited, the storage of edible property is well-documented. Narratives by previously enslaved people are particularly rich with references to the storage of sweet potatoes, perhaps the most important and widely cultivated crop in the gardens of enslaved people. Zenia Culp, who was previously enslaved, writes that her family “would dig a pit and line it with straw and put the tatoes in . . . [to] keep them from rotting” (68) Hidden away in the dark of a fireside hearth cellar, a good harvest of sweet potatoes could last through the winter, protected from dampness or chill, and even be banked for the next spring’s seeds. In a description of his childhood home in a plantation slave dwelling, Booker T. Washington remembered:
There was no wooden floor in our cabin, the naked earth being used as a floor. In the centre of the earthen floor there was a large, deep opening covered with boards, which was used as a place in which to store sweet potatoes during the winter. An impression of this potato-hole is very distinctly engraved upon my memory, because I recall that during the process of putting the potatoes in or taking them out I would often come into the possession of one or two, which I roasted and thoroughly enjoyed. (Washington 9)
In an otherwise bare and basic space, Washington’s family built a practical addition that facilitated years of simple routine. The storage of sweet potatoes may hardly seem revolutionary, but in constructing this underground space, the Washington family appropriated and amended their given environment to make it, even ever so slightly, their own.
Irish potatoes and a variety of vegetables, as well as nuts and grains, were also stored beneath enslaved people’s cabins. In one interview conducted by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Sylvia Watkins remembers how she would “raise up a plank” to collect potatoes to roast in the cabin’s large fireplace (Watkins 77). In another, Charlie Davenport recalls his time with the other enslaved children on the plantation: “Us little tykes would gather black walnuts in de woods an’ store fem under de cabins to dry” (Davenport 34). The stored nuts would be kept for future consumption, while their hulls might be used to dye fabric (Avery 23). Archaeological evidence supports these accounts; macroplant analysis by Leslie Raymer at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest estate revealed the presence of fruit seeds, possibly stored for planting; walnut shells; beans; and grains in excavated subfloor pits (Heath and Bennett 49). Additionally, enslaved people’s heavy reliance on wild food is evidenced in part by the recovered remnants of turtle, pigeon, squirrel, and other wild animals found in subfloor pits (Samford, “Engendering Enslaved Communities” 162). Stolen food, too, could be stored in pits. When apportioned rations failed to adequately feed Lula Jackson’s family, or when they grew tired of eating the same foods, Jackson recalls that the overseer and plantation owner “never could find my grandfather’s meat,” so well was it hidden beneath the cabin’s floor (Jackson 12).
When used as a root cellar, the subfloor pit’s value as a store for cultivated, foraged, or hunted property is best viewed through the rare potential for variety that it offered. Certainly, there were instances of extreme hunger on plantations, and the extra calories provided by a year-round supply of stored goods would contribute greatly to minimal rations. However, enslaved people not only found ways to supplement rations with their gardens and the accompanying cellars but also created within their oppressive environment unique opportunities for personal choice. Harvested or foraged food could be immediately consumed or traded, or they could be stored away to experience those same benefits later in the year. An armful of sweet potatoes might be pulled up from the cellar for a late winter meal, or a bundle of vegetables offered out of season might act as valuable trade items with plantation owners and other white Southerners. At Thomas Jefferson’s estate, “much of the produce purchased from Monticello slaves was out of season: potatoes were sold in December and February, hominy beans and apples purchased in April, and cucumbers bought in January” (Hatch 14). Root cellars provided the space for a personally crafted variety, created by enslaved people as they grew, hunted, or stole, and then stored.
The kinds of material property recovered from subfloor pits include items such as clothes, buttons and coins, tools, and what has been interpreted by some historical archaeologists as shrine assemblages (Samford, “Engendering Enslaved Communities” 163). To supplement these archaeological findings and the limited narrative insight into the storage of material goods, archaeologist John H. Sprinkle looks to the possessions and storage methods of Charles Cox, who was previously enslaved on the Whitehall Plantation in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, to determine the potential contents of subfloor storage pits. When a fire burned down the plantation’s grist mill, the chest where Cox kept his most precious belongings was mostly destroyed. Cox kept “his best clothes” inside the chest (Sprinkle 92), as well as other gifted and acquired items, and when the mill burned down, he spent several days looking for remnants of buttons or coins, expressing extreme remorse at the loss of his property. “If the contents of Cox’s chest are viewed from an archaeological perspective,” writes Sprinkle, “that is, in terms of what material culture would have survived in an archaeological context, then the assemblage resembles descriptions of slave ‘root cellars’” (Sprinkle 92). Cox’s mill chest functions similarly to a subfloor pit in that, while it was not exactly hidden or indestructible, it still offered a self-constructed space in which to keep and protect valuable personal possessions.
Surveillance of Slave Quarters
While evidence suggests that subfloor pits were indeed used by enslaved people to store property, scholars debate the significance and reasoning behind this particular kind of storage. Why keep personal or communal property in underground spaces as opposed to other methods of storage, or instead of leaving material items out in the open? A first assumption, one that Richard Kimmel deems “problematic,” might perceive subfloor pits as places of concealment (Kimmel 104). Evidence and accounts that portray cellars and pits as places of hiding certainly exist, particularly in instances of stolen food. To alleviate his extreme hunger as an enslaved person, Charles Grandy stole chickens from his enslaver’s roost and ferried them back to his cabin, dodging the punishment of patrol squads by slipping the birds under a trap door in the floor (Grandy 116). Similarly, the Overton children remembered watching their mother hide entire hogs beneath their home (Overton 267). In exceptional cases, humans were hidden in subfloor storage areas. William Henry Singleton describes in his memoir his remarkable experience as a young runaway hiding in his mother’s cabin. Singleton spent three years hiding and sleeping in his mother’s underground storage space, which was “not exactly a cellar, but a hole dug out to keep potatoes and things out of the way” (Singleton 39). In another narrative, Gus Smith recalls an occasion when Civil War guerilla soldiers arrived at his plantation to kidnap enslaved people to sell “down South” (Smith 283). Smith, his family’s youngest boy, watched his mother push his older brother beneath their cabin’s floorboards as the soldiers entered the house.
The stories of Singleton and Smith, however, are extraordinary cases, rare and dangerous instances where enslaved people managed to defy the high-surveillance environment of Southern plantations. As Walter Johnson describes in River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, the big house, or plantation owner’s house, looked over the slave quarters to enforce the enslaver’s surveilling gaze upon the enslaved and to incorporate the realms of the enslaver and the enslaved into one (232). Slave quarters were often close to the big house or placed along main paths and thus easily observable. Although a below-ground storage space may have offered some invisibility, concealing items or people inside them for long periods would have been almost impossible. Excavation of the Utopia plantation site at Kingsmill had remnants of a hinged door that could have been locked (Fesler 196), but most cellars would have been at least partially visible, and all were subject to searches by enslavers or patrollers. The power of enslavers in searches was, as Walter Johnson describes, “amplified” by the use of horses and dogs (222), animals that reared and barked wildly, adding an additional threatening and visceral dimension to the punitive aspect of enslavement and attempts at hiding. Enslavers assured that punishments of their enslaved workers were often physically excruciating and personally dehumanizing, by way of severe whipping, branding, or beating (Lewis 779). Enslaved people who attempted to hide themselves or their stolen goods in such an obvious place would have wrestled with the consequences of being discovered, consequences which included punishment and violence perhaps too severe to justify the action.
The restrictive and highly surveilled environment of the slave quarters suggests that any sort of domestic structure or activity, including subfloor pits, would likely have been known to plantation owners. An example of planter knowledge of slave storage spaces can be found in a journal entry of Colonel Landon Carter, who recounts the search through his plantation’s slave quarters for a stolen butter pot, during which “all their holes and boxes” were inspected until the missing pot was found in a loft space (Carter 495). In the case of stolen goods, an enslaved person’s cellar likely would have been the “easiest and most obvious place to search . . . [and] because each pit could be associated with a particular individual or group of individuals, blame for any theft could easily be assigned and punishment administered” (Samford, Subfloor Pits 140). In most cases, then, subfloor storage areas were unreliable hiding places. If planter knowledge of subfloor pits was almost certain, the question arises as to whether it is still appropriate to speak of “privacy” when analyzing the significance of these underground structures.
Security, Community, and Individualization
Penningroth identifies three threats to the security of enslaved people’s property: “theft, masters’ legal prerogatives, and the persistence of shared property interests among slaves” (“Slavery, Freedom” 418). The complicated notion of “ownership” by enslaved people, themselves “owned,” suggests that enslavers “posed a more serious threat” than community conflicts (Penningroth, “Slavery, Freedom” 418), but, as few enslavers seem to have enforced their legal hold over enslaved people’s property, and given the noted difficulties of concealment from enslavers, several scholars have made an alternative argument. Samford and Garrett Fesler, among others, hypothesize that the subfloor pit functioned as a sort of “safe-deposit box” (Samford, Subfloor Pits 141), a “design solution employed by the enslaved . . . to protect their own possessions from theft by fellow slaves” (Samford, Subfloor Pits 140).
However, enslaved individuals would have had even more awareness of their own structural environment than their enslavers, so the argument that subfloor pits would have been used to protect property from the eyes of fellow enslaved people is perhaps just as unsteady, allowing, of course, for exceptions. This analysis also sits slightly at odds with other studies on space development and property acquisition in slave quarters, most notably Penningroth’s work in The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. The idea of “hidden property” conflicts with the notions of community property interests and gain Penningroth explores in depth. “Part of property’s value for slaves, apart from its capacity to be used or consumed, lay in the social relationships it embodied” (Penningroth, “Slavery, Freedom” 418). Acquiring property rarely happened on one’s own and was often successful only when enslaved people enlisted the help of others to work for them as a means of gaining extra time (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk 80). “Most slaves got their property by drawing on their social relationships with each other,” looking to family members or neighbors for assistance (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk 82). Enslaved people obtained property often as a result of multiple people's efforts and interests, complicating the idea that security against fellow enslaved people would have been of primary concern. Shared interests often led to shared storage, and cabins with multiple families would have had a variety of shared property; enslaved people even “permitted their neighbors or relatives to store property with them in their cabins” (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk 95).
Public recognition was also integral to this dynamic; visibility of property was essential to the development of ownership. Penningroth’s key question in The Claims of Kinfolk is framed not as, “To whom does the property belong?” but instead as, “How do you know to whom the property belongs?” (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk 12). Samson Bacon, a previously enslaved man, explains, “I know it was his because every man on one place know every other man’s property” (Penningroth, “Slavery, Freedom” 420). An object only became property through public association and display, says Penningroth, and ownership was only possible because “property was enmeshed in several overlapping, sometimes competing, social relationships” (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk 108). The legal system which prevented official ownership, as well as the imposed status of enslaved people themselves as “owned,” prompted them to develop an adjusted system of ownership in the slave quarter, one that was based instead upon public acknowledgement and shared property interests. The concept of individual “privacy” fits uncomfortably within this context, and the word itself seems increasingly inappropriate. Storage of personal goods was an important component of choice and property accumulation in the enslaved community, but if Penningroth’s study of property relations is considered, then the complexity provided by the difficulties in acquiring and keeping property, as well as the social dynamics in which property was entrenched, requires a word better fitted to the setting, as well as a modified lens of study.
The legal system which prevented official ownership, as well as the imposed status of enslaved people themselves as “owned,” prompted them to develop an adjusted system of ownership in the slave quarter, one that was based instead upon public acknowledgement and shared property interests.
Because families and groups of individual enslaved people worked together to “overcome the difficulties involved in acquiring and keeping property in the close living arrangements of the quarters,” pits might be viewed less as a space for hiding from fellow enslaved people and more as a structure that helped to organize ownership and shared property interests within the limited space of the slave quarters (Penningroth, “Slavery, Freedom” 416). In discussing property storage and separation, Penningroth notes the testimony of Samuel Fuller, a formerly enslaved man, who recalls, “I knew it was [Dargan’s] property because it was on his side of the room” (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk, 97). Essex Dargan, another enslaved man on the same plantation, explains that, while he shared a space with his wife and her parents in which they stored “several hundred pounds of bacon in the cabin,” the parents’ bacon “was all separate from mine” (Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk, 96-7). The accounts of enslaved people quoted in Claims of Kinfolk and elsewhere make clear that, while property interests were inextricably linked to public display, organization and ownership distinction were still important. By expanding the potential for storage and organization into the underground, enslaved people manipulated the constrictive dimensions of the imposed living quarters to fit the realities and activities of enslaved life. The relationships and interactions inherent to property acquisition required an accompanying construction of space to accommodate the structural needs of the slave quarter’s dynamic social setting.
Root cellars and storage pits were a hybrid of individual and community constructed space in an environment where it was extraordinarily difficult to achieve either.
Although the community interactions which represented enslaved people’s property somewhat discount the value of subfloor pits as “private” spaces, the significance of underground storage need not be diminished. Root cellars and storage pits were a hybrid of individual and community constructed space in an environment where it was extraordinarily difficult to achieve either. John Michael Vlach, in discussing the organization of the plantation, writes: “slave quarters were only incidentally meant as residences; they were, foremost, the planters’ instruments of social control” (165), a way to further the herd treatment of enslaved people as a homogenous collective, rather than a group of individuals. Enslavers used the structure and organization of the slave dwellings to reinforce the inferior status inflicted upon those enslaved, creating a space in which enslaved people were merely expected to live “quietly without challenging the plantation system” (McKee 200). The proximity of the slave quarters to the main house or overseer’s lodgings, combined with constrained schedules and dehumanizing tactics, should have provided few opportunities for individualization and the development of subsistence practices. Any personalization of living accommodation, therefore, acts in direct subversion to the homogenizing efforts of the system of enslavement and its enforcers. Enslaved people created subfloor pits in order to store shared and individual goods, fulfilling a practical need while also crafting a container for the products of determined attempts at semi-autonomous economic and social activity.
Conclusion: Subfloor Pits and the “Geography of Resistance”
The subfloor pit, subtle and small as it may be, is a product of space re-appropriation, the kind of which, Lefebvre argues, is necessary to make significant and meaningful change to the conditions of life that surround a person. Enslavers may have set innumerable measures of control and restriction upon enslaved people, but enslaved people just as readily responded with subtle or overt adjustments of subversion. The subfloor pit was a container for property and the choices and autonomy that came with that property, in an environment where enslavers attempted to prevent all three. Because enslaved people purposefully constructed this spatial manipulation within such an oppressive environment, the primary significance of subfloor pits is perhaps found not among the topics of anonymity and hiding, but among their opposites. Enslaved people increased the space they occupied by expanding into the underground, despite an environment crafted by the enslaver to enforce as limited a life as possible. The imposed architecture of the slave quarter was inadequate for supporting a meaningful and productive life but, in a quiet and subtle way, enslaved people’s construction of subfloor pits shifted the domestic landscape to extend their autonomous practices.
The “carceral” environment of enslavement, as Walter Johnson describes, includes two acting landscapes: the plantation and its surroundings (228-234). The senses factor heavily in Johnson’s descriptions of the interacting, yet distinct, settings. The plantation enforced an imposing visual landscape which surveilled enslaved people, its structures symbolically enforcing the bondage of African American laborers (Johnson 232). Meanwhile, in the surrounding forests and swamps, Johnson highlights the auditory senses relied upon by enslaved people as they foraged and hid, often under the cover of night. The sound of horses’ hooves and barking patrol dogs helped to shape this external landscape that enforced the restrictive and punitive nature of enslavement (Johnson 232). Cheryl Janifer LaRoche also highlights the terrifying elements of the lands surrounding the plantation, portraying in dualistic relation to its status as a landscape of potential freedom in her book Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (87-102).
LaRoche’s “geography of resistance” focuses on the larger landscape surrounding the dominating plantation setting, but the study of subfloor pits suggests a third landscape that existed within that of the plantation but with a distinctive set of activities and interactions that warrant separate recognition. While Johnson’s landscapes regulate and often overwhelm through the internal senses, subfloor pits instead acted largely as a symbol of actions within the domestic landscape of enslavement. Beneath the floors of their cabins, enslaved people placed the products of trade, cultivation, and handiwork, all of which contributed to a highly dynamic environment that, while often operating in close proximity to the main house, was curated wholly by enslaved people. In the discussion of place-based factors of enslaved resistance, the architecture of enslaved life stakes its claim to significance among a set of overlapping landscapes, each with their own parameters of restriction and resistance.
Resistance, in this instance, takes a much different form than the images of visible conflict and energetic opposition which the term might usually conjure. Several scholars, including the acclaimed historian Robin Kelley, have argued for a radical shift in the historical study of resistance by oppressed peoples. In his study of the resistance politics of the Black working class in the United States, Kelley explores the ways in which subversion is carried out through everyday forms of resistance. These acts, whether intentionally subversive or not, “have a cumulative effect on power relations” between oppressors and the oppressed (Kelley 8). By using subfloor pits as hiding places for stolen goods or hidden family members, enslaved individuals exhibited the elusive “guerilla” acts of resistance that Kelley describes in depth—evasive and largely invisible daily acts of direct subversion (Kelley 7). Yet, even though food and property storage are rarely described using explicit reference to resistance in the narratives of formerly enslaved people, the subfloor pit stands as a subversive structure chiefly through the practical uses for which it was primarily constructed. By employing the structure for everyday acts of autonomous activity, enslaved people worked within the sphere of day-to-day resistance that functioned outside the sphere of organized or institutionalized efforts. As Kelley argues, the “margins of struggle” (4)—the subtle acts of survival and subversion which often occur without fanfare—are a fundamental component of the study of resistance. The subversive qualities of subfloor pits are unique, but the structure fits well within the study of elusive, everyday tactics which subverted the oppressing efforts of enslavers.
To take up space, to create space, in an environment where life was specially constructed to prevent enslaved people from forming any sort of distinctive life or identity, was subversive.
To take up space, to create space, in an environment where life was specially constructed to prevent enslaved people from forming any sort of distinctive life or identity, was subversive. When enslaved people dug subfloor pits, the result was an accompanying container for acts of subsistence and, therefore, resistance. In the imposed, oppressive environment of enslavement, the presence of subfloor pits indicates an attempt by enslaved people to move beyond what Johnson calls the “material and spatial condition” of enslavement (210) to form an autonomous space within the slave quarter—a structure of semi-concealed subversion functioning practically underneath the enslaver’s nose. Such is the nature of the underground. Beneath the dynamic activities of subsistence and resistance, enslaved people built economic storage cases and self-constructed social spaces in the form of subfloor pits, breaking through the confines of their imposed living conditions to create a place of their own design.
Definitions
Enslaved people: Following recent shifts in academic language, terms such as “enslaved person” (instead of “slave”) and “enslaver” (instead of “owner/master”) are used in this paper. This shift acknowledges the humanity of the enslaved person and recognizes that enslavement was a state forced upon a person by others. The term “slave” is kept in the case of quotations and in referring to well-known features within the system (i.e., “slave quarter").
Alongside and between: Mart A. Stewart explains the development of social and economic landscapes within the plantation, discussing the social construction of space by enslaved people in tidewater rice plantations in the Southern Lowcountry. Especially important to this idea is the notion that enslaved people and enslavers, while technically occupying the same landscapes, perceived and exploited these landscapes in completely different ways. (Stewart, "Rice, Water, and Power" 216)
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Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Belknap Press, 2013.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Free Press, 1994.
Kelso, William M. Kingsmill Plantations, 1619-1800: Archaeology of Country Life in Colonial Virginia, Studies in Historical Archaeology. Academic Press, 1984.
Kimmel, Richard H. "Notes on the Cultural Origins and Functions of Sub-Floor Pits." Historical Archaeology vol. 27, no. 3, 2016, pp. 102-13.
Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery: 1619-1877. 10thed., Hill and Wang, 2003.
LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer. Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance. University of Illinois Press, 2013.
Lefebvre, Henri. “Space: Social Product and Use Value.” State, Space, World, edited by Stuart Elden and Neil Brenner, University of Minnesota Press, 2009, pp. 185-95.
Lewis, Thomas "Slaves, Punishment of." In Encyclopedia of African American Society, edited by Gerald D. Jaynes, pp. 779-80. SAGE Publications, Inc., 2005.
McCray, Stephen. Interviewer unknown. Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 13, Oklahoma, Adams-Young, 1936, pp. 207-9. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn130/.
McKee, Larry “The Ideals and Realities Behind the Design and Use of 19th Century Virginia Slave Cabins.” The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, edited by Anne Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1992, pp. 195-213.
Morgan, Philip D. "The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low Country." The Journal of Southern History vol. 49, no. 3, 1983, pp. 399-420.
“November 1788,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-05-02-0004-0011. [Original source: The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 5, 1 July 1786 – 31 December 1789, edited by Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, University Press of Virginia, 1979, pp. 415–429.
Overton Family. Interviewer unknown. Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 10, Missouri, Abbot-Younger, 1936, pp. 266-8. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn100/.
Penningroth, Dylan C. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-century South. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
---. "Slavery, Freedom, and Social Claims to Property among African Americans in Liberty County, Georgia, 1850-1880." The Journal of American History vol. 84, no. 2, 1997, pp. 405-35.
Pyles, Henry F. Interviewer unknown. Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 13, Oklahoma, Adams-Young, 1936, pp. 245-56. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn130/.
Rigger, Charlie. Interview with Irene Robertson. Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 6, Quinn-Tuttle, 1936, pp. 39-41. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn026/.
Robertson, Irene. Interview with Hannah Hancock. Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson-Isom, 1936, pp. 142-6. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
Samford, Patricia. “Engendering Enslaved Communities on Virginia’s and North Carolina’s Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Plantations.” Engendering African American Archaeology: A Southern Perspective, edited by Jillian E. Galle and Amy L. Young, University of Tennessee Press, 2004, pp. 151-75.
---. Subfloor Pits and the Archaeology of Slavery in Colonial Virginia. University of Alabama Press, 2007.
Shapiro, Herbert. "The Impact of the Aptheker Thesis: A Retrospective View of "American Negro Slave Revolts.” Science & Society vol. 48, no. 1, 1984, pp. 52-73.
Singleton, William Henry. Recollections of My Slavery Days. University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Smith, Gus. Interviewer unknown. Voices From Slavery, Edited by Norman R. Yetman. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, 1970.
Sprinkle, John H. "The Contents of Charles Cox's Mill House Chest." Historical Archaeology vol. 25, no. 3, 1991, pp. 91-3.
Stewart, Mart A. "Rice, Water, and Power." Out of The Woods, edited by Char Miller and Hal Rothman, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, pp. 215-26.
Thomas, Brian W. "Power and Community: The Archaeology of Slavery at the Hermitage Plantation." American Antiquity vol. 63, no. 4, 1998, pp. 531-51.
Virginia Writers' Project. The Negro in Virginia. American Negro, His History and Literature. Arno Press, 1969.
Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Newburyport: Open Road Media, 2016.
Watkins, Sylvia. Interviewer unknown. Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 15, Tennessee, Batson-Young, 1936, pp. 76-9. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn150/.
Author
Hannah Swartos is a writer whose nonfiction work focuses on food, agriculture, and environmental history. Hannah will spend the summer in the field researching the socio-cultural phenomenon of transhumance in the Irish uplands before graduating from Western in the Fall with a degree in History. She is based primarily in Perthshire, Scotland.