North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Sister Anna: An African Woman in Early North Carolina

34 Sister Anna An African Woman in Early North Carolina Jon Sensbach    A worn but legible notebook housed in an archive in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, contains an unusual and precious document: the “Diary of the Negro Congregation in and around Salem.” A record of one of the state’s earliest African American churches founded during the slavery period, the diary, kept by white ministers from the Moravian Church, describes baptisms, deaths, worship services, musical performances, and relations among congregants, most of whom were enslaved. It all adds up to a rare account of African American religious life before the Civil War. Lives emerge from these pages that might otherwise be lost to us. One of those was an elderly congregant named Anna, who died on September 4, 1829. Recording her obituary in the diary, minister Abraham Steiner wrote in the German script characteristic of the Moravian immigrants who had settled in North Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century. His description of Anna began like this: “She was born in Africa and brought to this land as a slave when she was young. Here she lived in several places until she came to Salem more than fifty years ago, where she was baptized and admitted into Holy Communion.” After arriving in Salem, the minister continued, she married another Africanborn Moravian named Christian, who died just a few years later, and she lived a widow for the next forty years. “She was faithful and punctual in the work assigned to her and was treated more like a maid than as a slave [lieber Dienstmagd als Sklavin behandelt],” Steiner noted. “She had her peculiarities, but when one learned to know her better, one found that she knew in whom she believed and in whom she placed her trust, and she put up with all kinds of rudeness. . . . Her age must have been more than eighty years.” However brief, Steiner’s memorial is important for its record of the life and death of an African woman at a time when African-born survivors of the Atlan- Sister Anna 35 tic slave trade were becoming ever fewer in the American population. If Anna came to America on a slave ship as a young girl and was about eighty at the time of her death, she would probably have arrived in British colonial America sometime during the 1760s, at the height of the trade when tens of thousands of Africans made the forced voyage each year. Yet of the millions of enslaved African women brought to the Americas in the nearly four-hundred-year history of the slave trade, few are known to historians or to the public. One exception is the famous Bostonian poet Phillis Wheatley, who also was brought to America as a girl at roughly the same time as Anna, but who, in all her atypicality, has become a sort of stand-in for all African women. Whereas African men such as Olaudah Equiano, Venture Smith, and James Albert Gronniasaw left a small but valuable canon of memoirs describing their experience of enslavement, almost no women left such narratives, and other biographical information about African women under slavery is scant. Such archival gaps are not accidental. As historians such as Deborah Gray White and others have noted, the relative scarcity of sources about enslaved women reflects their own inability and lack of opportunity to document their own lives as well as the attitude of the record-keeping planters and officials who viewed them with the racial scorn that underlay the very system of slavery itself. But it also indicates what White calls black women’s “culture of dissemblance”— their own strategies to avoid drawing attention to themselves, which, they knew, only brought trouble. Thus, we might think of critical holes in the documentary record concerning black women under slavery as “articulate silences” that reveal even as they conceal. Thus, Abraham Steiner’s obituary provides a valuable entry point into the life of one such woman. In fact, though she had no opportunity to leave a written statement herself, Anna left more archival footprints than one might expect. As a baptized church member, she appears in numerous Moravian records, including baptismal and marriage registers, church diaries, and official reports. While significant gaps in the record remain, enough information exists to reconstruct something of the life of one African woman’s experiences in American captivity . Many of those experiences were not necessarily any more typical of enslaved women than Phillis Wheatley’s. Anna lived...