Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia

5. Race, Identity, and Community

97 chapter five race, identity, and community spencer malvin had decided who he wanted to be: a free man in a free state where he could freely denounce slavery. His departure forced others to make choices about their identities too. One enslaved man named Sandy chose as Malvin did and fled with him to Pennsylvania; Spencer had not left quite all of his friends behind when he left Virginia. Sandy’s owner, John L. Fant (who had signed the petition supporting federal aid to colonize free people of color), explained that in his “decided opinion . . . Spencer Malvin the Husband of Lucy . . . was instrumental in persuading my servant man Sandy to leave the state of Virginia ago to Pensilvania with aview [sic] to obtain his freedom.” For Malvin, taking an enslaved man with him entailed great risk. Even on his own, Malvin would have been a suspect person—an unfamiliar man of color traveling from a slave state toward a free one. With Sandy, they would cause even more suspicion among Virginia’s slave patrols, who had the power to stop and question any black people they saw. In addition the two of them had to worry that once Fant realized that Sandy was gone, Fant might send out designated slave catchers to find his escaped slave, directing them not to stop at the Virginia border but to continue to Maryland and Pennsylvania. Heightening the risk was the fact that by traveling in Sandy’s company, Malvin had turned himself 98 chapter five into a criminal, as it was illegal to help a slave run off. Malvin made the eighty-odd miles from Warrenton to the Pennsylvania line into much more dangerous territory for himself by choosing to travel with an escaped slave. That he did so points to the strength of his feelings against slavery and his sense of alliance with his enslaved brethren. An identification with slaves was precisely what Samuel Johnson, and Lucy following him, had sought repeatedly to reject . So when Spencer Malvin “abscond[ed]” from Virginia accompanied by a runaway slave, Lucy and Samuel Johnson did all they could to distance themselves from him and his actions and to reconfirm the Johnsons’ relatively privileged place in the community. That took some work because a woman was considered to be one with her husband, and in the wake of Spencer’s departure, Lucy would naturally come under suspicion of harboring feelings similar to Spencer’s. Lucy’s color, which was not associated with social respectability, made the task all the more difficult. Lucy’s and Samuel’s efforts to recreate Lucy’s identity after Spencer’s departure show that they understood that identity was mutable. They worked in the context of community because one forged one’s identity within a community and not as an individual apart. And they acted with the awareness that Lucy and her children did not actually have a legal right to stay in Virginia. Recreating Lucy’s place in Warrenton would therefore require a multipronged strategy. The family’s actions, and the community’s response to them, add more details to our understanding of race in Virginia and of how race as a set of practices changed over time. Turner’s Rebellion had made things worse for free blacks, especially in the law, but the on-the-ground reality continued to defy a simple narrative. The Johnson family’s insistence on staying put—their small way of making history by asserting their right to stay in the land of their birth—made it necessary that they and their Race, Identity, and Community 99 white neighbors find a way to live with one another. And so they did. Spencer helped Lucy in her quest to divorce herself from his reputation and recreate her life without him by cutting all ties with her. He sent no word of where he was, no note of explanation or apology, and no assurance that he was all right. Perhaps he understood that his silence was necessary if Lucy were to reattach herself to her father’s favorable reputation. If so, his silence was an act of love. But more likely, he was simply angry and disgusted with those, like Lucy and Samuel, who did not fight back. Samuel Johnson seems also to have been angry and a bit disgusted , so he took Malvin to court. Spencer Malvin was long gone, but...