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SIX: Suckey's Looking Glass: African Americans as Consumers
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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six Suckey’s Looking Glass African Americans as Consumers 173 Richard Stith’s slave Suckey purchased a looking glass and a ribbon at John Hook’s store in February 1774. She paid for them by supplying four pounds “cotton in ye seed.” When I first encountered the record of her purchase in a tiny account book, I neatly entered it into my large database of store purchases: I categorized the object as an item of “personal adornment” and noted that the buyer was female and a slave. As a quanti- fier I felt comfortable with my numbers and words. As a material culture scholar, I began to muse. Why did Suckey choose a mirror? What does a mirror do? Does it matter that Suckey was both part of an emerging AngloAmerican consumer culture and part of the African diaspora? So I followed the active agent, the enslaved Suckey, to explore possible reasons why a slave might buy things and to determine if others were consumers like her. More importantly, I followed the objects she purchased in order to consider their range of meanings. Finding the answers to my questions required exploring multiple cultures in the trans-Atlantic world, and they revealed new ways of thinking about a specific place and time. This chapter examines enslaved men and women as players in the world of goods. It turns the spotlight of our stage on the slaves and explores their actions as presented in the formulaic narrative of bookkeeping. It also uses evidence found in and on objects, objects like those Suckey and other slaves purchased, to reconsider aspects of the lives of these otherwise little-known men and women. It looks at slaves and market activity as a series of behaviors linking people, physical movements through public and private landscapes , and material things. Three crucial aspects are assessed: How the slaves provided the goods or services that gave them the credit needed to purchase consumer goods; what motivated them to engage in this kind of entrepreneurial activity; and whether the purchase represented a desire to improve their level of comfort or an expression of their heritage or religion. The experience of slaves in the retail trade presents a profound paradox. Slaves could appropriate commodities even as they could be appropriated as commodities themselves. The same account books bearing their names as customers could also record their sale to a new owner; a single merchant could both serve them and own them. The ability to purchase consumer goods put slaves on the same performance stage as poorer whites, and it allowed them to make choices—however limited. Markets and Market Culture Recent historical scholarship has dramatically reshaped our understanding of the ways in which slaves in the New World participated in market culture for themselves.1 By the middle of the eighteenth century in Virginia, masters generally supplied slaves with food and clothing that met basic needs. Slaves also had free time, although the amount varied (and reflected the temperament of the owner, the stage in the crop cycle, and the location of the plantation), as did the slaves’ energy to use it. In sum, slaves worked. What they did, the degree to which they worked for themselves as well as their owners, what they consumed, saved, and bequeathed, all formed the basic pattern of their lives. The two overlapping circles—work for master and work for self—set the boundaries. The work for self extended far into slave culture—it was initially a way of providing better subsistence but it ultimately became a way of obtaining access to both cash and consumer goods.2 Indeed the introduction of cash into the rural plantation economy changed the lives of slaves as much as it did the lives of planters by creating hierarchies ordered on wealth, status, and power in slave societies.3 Successful acquisition of commodities and consumer goods by slaves was a basic determinant of larger changes within slave society and how the Anglo-American culture viewed the slaves. Most slaves gained access to the world of goods by selling their own surplus agricultural commodities, such as poultry and vegetables. Those slaves who came from West Africa were no strangers to market sales and market relations; the Yoruba expression “aye l’oya” (the world is a marketplace) is a constructive metaphor for what one scholar terms “the dynamics surrounding transactions, the pushes and pulls, the actions and reactions, the negotiations of living life.”4 In the New World region...