Altaring
hallelu, hallelu, hallelu/ hallelu, hallelu my Lord/I’m gonna see my friends again, hallelu [1]
“The crime of oppression is national,” published the abolitionist who’d never known bondage.[2]
…death come to my house/didn’t stay long/looked on my bed and my father was gone/I’m gonna see my friends again/hallelu
There is a swamp in Tsenacomoco,
south of the Powhatan. The Nansemond
called it, pocosin,
in Algonquin. They lived
in and around and with it.
The Nottoway with territory
to the north west may have called
it keenu in their Iroquoian tongue.
Their lands were full of swamps.
Their nations were the first
to flee and find life in the pocosin’s channels.[3]
The James River, 2.3.20 | Photographer: Mary Anna Richardson Hartley
…death come to my house/didn’t stay long/looked at my bed and my momma was gone/I’m gonna see my friends again/hallelu
In Middle English, dismal is a noun. It is the word for two unlucky days on the calendar in each month, a tradition from medieval times. A dismal came to mean any day or days of disaster. By 1607, the English used dismal as an adjective.[4]
The swamp confounded the colonizers. They called it a dismal and stumbled over the word pocosin as they tried to describe it to their countrymen. They called Tsenacomoco after their own queen. Virginia. They named the Powhatan River after their own king. James. They tried to map it, to go through it, to loot it. They called it a new name: the Great Dismal Swamp. Generations of English tried to tell the swamp it was property over which this king or that queen exerted dominion.
Each time the pocosin smirked and grew and overgrew and gave them unlucky days.
…death come to my house/didn’t stay long/looked at my bed and my sister was gone/I’m gonna see my friends again/hallelu
The swamp swarmed, slithered,
flooded, and flushed with wildlife
and wild life.
In its center there remains
a lake full of Gäthum.
A hunter outsmarted the Fire Bird,
forced it to flee, and the blood
of its young dyed
the water red forever.
Today, scientists speak of the peat
and its smoldering
that causes the pigment
of the water. Smoke
and persistence created
the lake where there is evidence
that the first people grew corn.
The swamp still
burns, a part
of its ecology,
a cycle of renewal,
creation,
and life.
hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, I’m gonna see my friends again/ my Lord...
In the pocosin with the blood lake, the maroons wrapped themselves in life. Africans, Atlantic Creoles, Negroes, Blacks, Free People of Color, Free Blacks, free people, and people living free went to its shifting ground and hidden arbors.
The local folks knew the life in the swamp because they’d known the people in the swamp. They’d learned truancy alongside them in local marshes, stands of trees, dugouts, and quarters.
They’d noticed what was missing from smokehouses, stills, orchards, gardens.
Their observation of absence kept silent. A moment of stopped work.
A way to pray for outliers.
A genuflection to the shared places.
Empty spaces.
Invisible altars.
The folks saw the outlines of kin. Their fingerprints in bricks made together. The spot kept open for a favorite hoe gone from the shed they’d built. There were gaps left for them in the gangs that moved through rows. There were places made for them on kitchen floors in the winter when the ice turned the swamp hard. In lofts and haystacks and stalls. In the lines of late-night deep forest reels and jigs.
A dance made a field hand into free feet tracing flame in the sandy loam.
Cabin Pond | Vanessa M. Holden
Devil come to your house/won’t stay long/ looked on your bed/ somebody’s gone/ I’m gonna see my friends again/hallelu
Word of the rebellion quickly moved
beyond the Nottoway lands
west of the swamp. The enslavers
called the place Southampton County.
They’d wanted land for tobacco
but the pocosin gave
them sand for soil.
When news reached into
neighboring counties that nearly sixty
white men, women, and children
were dead, the enslavers feared
that the maroons had brought
their free living out of the swamp.
“The slaves need no incentives at our hands,” cried the abolitionist worried for his printing press who did not know about the Fire Bird, the blood, the altars. [5]
Vernacular Curation 1 | Vanessa M. Holden
The local folks knew
the truth. The swamp
was everywhere.
Remains of Cypress Bridge on the Nottoway River | Vanessa M. Holden
Devil come to your house/won’t stay long/ looked on your bed/ somebody’s gone/ I’m gonna see my friends again/hallelu
I scratched a hole
under a pile of fence rails
in a field, where I concealed
myself
for six weeks.
The enslavers called them hands,
but they were also ears.
I began to go about in the night
and eaves drop the houses in the neighborhood.[6]
They kept Nat Turner hidden
as they kept the others. For two months
he was as perceptible as empty space.
Vernacular Curation 2 | Vanessa M. Holden
hallelu, hallelu, hallelu/ hallelu, hallelu my Lord/I’m gonna see my friends again, hallelu
“For ourselves,” said the abolitionist, “we are horror-struck at the late tidings.” [7]
Native Oak, Southampton | Vanessa M. Holden
[1] Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Hallelu,” River of Life: Harmony One, Rounder Records, 1986.
[2] William Lloyd Garrison and James Brown Yerrinton. "The liberator." Newspaper. Boston, Mass.: William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp, September 3, 1831. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/mc87rm83f (accessed May 29, 2020) 3.
[3] Brent Morris, “‘Running Servants and All Others’: The Diverse An Elusive Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp,” in Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy, ed. William H. Alexander, Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander, and Charles H. Ford (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) 94.
[4] "dismal, n. and adj.". OED Online. March 2020. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.uky.edu/view/Entry/54731?rskey=1xOdcK&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed May 29, 2020).
[5] Garrison, "The Liberator,” 3.
[6] Nat Turner, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in The Confessions of Nat Turner with Related Documents Second Edition, ed, Kenneth S. Greenberg, (Bedford St. Martins, 2017)
[7] Garrison, "The Liberator,” 3.
Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Holden’s current book project, titled, Surviving Southampton: Gender and Community the Southampton Rebellion of 1831(University of Illinois Press), explores the contributions that African American women and children, free and enslaved, made to the Southampton Rebellion, also called Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Dr. Holden’s work and writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. She also blogs for Black Perspectives and The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History. In addition to her work on enslaved women and slave rebellion, Dr. Holden also co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group (#QSWG) with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Her second project, Forming Intimacies: Queer Kinship and Resistance in the Antebellum American Atlantic, will focus on same gender loving individuals and American slavery. Dr. Holden serves as a faculty adviser or consultant on a number of public history and digital humanities projects including: Freedom on the Move (a digital archive of runaway slave adds); Black Horsemen of the Kentucky Turf (an exhibit chronicling the intersecting histories of African Americans and the horse industry in Kentucky), and a grant project aimed at bringing a virtual driving tour and a museum to Southampton County, Virginia, that interpret the Southampton Rebellion. Find her on Twitter @drvholden.