Capturing Creswell

For the past five years, I’ve been living with Elihu Creswell. I’ve listened to his rough, uncertain voice, belligerent, tender, defensive. I’ve looked at the clothes he wears, the mud-spattered trousers, the heavy shoes, the one good shirt—white, of course, with soft, white underthings beneath. You’d never know, the way he dresses, how much money the man has, but that’s often what happens when someone works his way up from nothing and still can’t believe what a rich man he is, never mind that it almost never makes sense to dress up for the job he does. I’ve seen him doing that work, standing in the hot sun, ignoring the one patch of shade in the bare, steamy yard, so that the people he’s giving orders to won’t think he’s soft, will respect, indeed, fear him. I’ve watched him eat and drink and get ready for bed. I’ve even seen him in bed, witnessed what I assumed were his most private moments. Maybe I haven’t learned all his intimate secrets, but haven’t I discovered some? I thought I knew him. I thought I had made him mine.

Elihu Creswell was a slave trader. He bought people at the cheapest prices he could find and sold them for as much as the market would bear. I first encountered him in October 2002 as I worked my way through the state supreme court transcripts archived at the University of New Orleans. Most of these cases involved someone suing a slave dealer for selling defective merchandise: slaves who later became sick, died, or ran away.

I was beginning to write a novel about slavery, and Creswell’s story immediately seized my imagination. He had sold a thirty-two-year-old enslaved woman named Clarissa in her ninth month of pregnancy, so pregnant that “the milk was coming out of her breasts.” While Louisiana law did not allow Clarissa to be sold away from her children, it did allow her to be separated from them, so Creswell first saw her at the New Orleans jail, where she was confined with her eighteen-month-old daughter; her three-year-old son remained with her owners. Clarissa had been sent there on account of having “too much Jaw”: she was “saucy” and talked back to her owners, known for her complaining. This was a key point for the defendant, since the plaintiff would later charge that she’d had angina pectoris, “dependent upon a diseased heart.” Yet if Clarissa had indeed suffered from heart disease, why had she never spoken of pains, palpitations, or anxiety? Her only complaint, according to her former mistress’s brother, was that her feet were swollen from her pregnancy, making it difficult to go freely about her work.

Creswell took Clarissa from the slave jail to his own depot on Common Street, where he sold her to David R. Coulter, a farmer from Union County, Arkansas. Coulter transported her by steamboat to the landing at Alexandria, from which he bundled her into a wagon and drove her “over the rough roads of Arkansas.” A few days later, she died.

Coulter quickly claimed he’d been sold defective merchandise and demanded a refund on the money he’d paid for Clarissa. To prove she had been defective, he had three separate autopsies performed on her still-warm body. Every time I read them, I began to cry:

The woman Clarissa (a mulatto or copper colored) about 35 or 40 years of age, was in the advanced state of pregnancy: her body was lying with a slight inclination to the right side, eyes closed, inferior extremities extended, cold & rigid, left forearm flexed and the hand lying on the chest, near the region of the heart; and the right hand was applied to the epigastric region. The abdomen and thorax were warm. Her appearance was that of a person in a natural sleep; not the slightest indication of pain or convulsions were discoverable. The examination was commenced by making an incision from the ensiforone cartilage to the os pubis, by...