I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives

Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher (1798)

Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher
Introduction Susanna Ashton Slave narratives often tell of harrowing journeys on roads besieged with patrollers and bounty hunters who were eager to seize unaccompanied blacks, whether free or slaves. Many nineteenth-century slaves escaped by boat or train or through the woods primarily to avoid the dangers of public roads. Boston King’s account of trekking by foot through Patriot-held territory in South Carolina in order to deliver a call for reinforcements from a besieged British encampment reminds us that for eighteenth-century black Carolinians during the American Revolution, the roadside terrors were of a different sort.* For Boston King, the dangers of capture by the American rebel forces were so great that he declined the offer of a horse, preferring to travel almost thirty miles on foot as the safer option. He wrote, “I expected every moment to fall in with the enemy, whom I well knew would shew me no mercy.” When he heard a “great noise” on the road, he dove off the path and hid for his life. Although he eventually made it safely to his destination and delivered the message, “all that I ever received for this service” was “three shillings, and many fine promises.” While Boston King’s entire narrative is characterized by hope and salvation rather than bitterness, this incident of miserly rewards coupled with *For a thorough overview of slaves and the American Revolution, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973). Also see Frey, Water from the Rock. Memoirs of the Life of Boston King | 15 fine promises presaged the larger story of what was to become his transatlantic life. Boston King had fled from Richard Waring’s South Carolina plantation and served with the British troops in a bold gamble for his freedom .* His story may or may not be an American slave narrative (it is not, for example, included in William L. Andrews’s authoritative bibliography of North American slave narratives maintained by the Documents of the American South Web project), but it is certainly a transatlantic tale that has its origins in South Carolina. For this reason it offers readers a remarkable perspective on the role of guerrilla warfare in the South.† However, more than that, it is a conversion narrative that chronicles his deepening sense of what freedom meant to him. Following King’s repeated displacements makes his search for a spiritual home from which he might never be moved that much more poignant. As he explains regarding trying to convert Africans to Christianity, with their conversion not only would “all pain and wretchedness be at an end,” but also they might “enjoy peace without interruption”—surely an appeal that the chronically uprooted King found compelling. While his father was from Africa, King was born a slave outside of Charleston around 1760 and as a young child worked in Richard Waring’s plantation house and tended cattle. As a youngster he had the first in a series of increasingly intense spiritual visions that shaped his life and his memoir. While his first vision led him to acknowledge a true God, it nonetheless left him baffled about where such an acknowledgment should lead. As he wrote, “how to serve god I knew not.” At sixteen years of age King was apprenticed to a trade (apparently a master carpenter). King’s narrative at this point recounts in detail the hardships inflicted by other apprentices, journeymen, and the master carpenter until King’s “proprietor” (most likely Waring) intervened and insisted that young King be better treated. King did not look on these years of apprenticeship *Richard Waring’s 526-acre plantation was originally called White Hall, but he changed the name to Tranquil Hill. Made possible by the forced labor of enslaved people, the beauty of the plantation was described by its contemporaries in rapturous terms. See Henry A. M. Smith, “The Ashley River: Its Seats and Settlements,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 20, no. 1 (January 1919): 50. See also a discussion of the historical gardens and archaeological projects related to the Waring property at http://chicora.org/plantation-garden-archaeology.html. †See William L. Andrews’s masterfully assembled scholarly bibliography of North American slave narratives, available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/biblintro.html. 16 | I Belong to...