Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Brazile writes in the first-person perspective as Richard Allen, an enslaved man who died as a Methodist bishop. He describes his two owners, Benjamin Chew and Stokley Sturgis. After hearing a preacher he feels that he can work on his moral shortcomings. He commits to a life of purity and morality.

The preacher also convinces Sturgis that he can no longer morally own slaves. Sturgis releases Allen to find work and pay him for his release. Being free is harder in some ways: “It was hard to get jobs. It was hard just to live. We even found it hard to be dead—we were not allowed to own cemeteries in which to bury our deceased” (154). He also finds that lenders are reluctant or unwilling to issue loans to African Americans.

By 1787, Allen, along with other African Americans, is banned from St. George’s, the church where he worships. He reads the Constitution: “Nowhere are the words slave or slavery to be found” (155). The omission in the Constitution allows for the existence of slavery in America because it is not expressly and legally forbidden.

Allen establishes a Free African Society, a nondenominational church, to help newly freed Blacks. It provides mentorship, community, and love for people who need help. Allen says that the tools God gave him are still available to everyone today: “Faith and self-discipline, community, and moral leadership” (157). They were solutions to problems in the 18th century and can be solutions to similar problems today.

Sally Hemings lived at the Hotel de Langeac in 1789. She had been the companion of Mary Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s nine-year-old daughter. In Paris she became Jefferson’s concubine and was probably pregnant with his child near the age of 16. Jefferson paid her and her brother, aware that they could have remained free under French law. They could have avoided returning to America. Sally did not want to be enslaved again, and Jefferson promised that if she returned, she would be privileged, and her children would be free at age 21.

Sally returned to the United States. She lived with Jefferson for 37 years and gave him seven children. Four of them survived and lived as free adults.

Voting was the master virtue of the new republic, and “[o]verwhelmingly, white male voters created clauses in the U.S. Constitution that attended to slavery, one of the new nation’s most pressing political issues” (162). One of the most significant was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The Act, a response to Northern abolitionist activity, made it illegal to aid a fugitive slave.

The Fugitive Slave Act gave rise to the industry of professional slave catchers. Their employ was a signal that “a white person’s claim to stolen property was inherently more important than a Black person’s right to freedom and liberty” (164).

The African American response to the Fugitive Slave Act would be critical in what would eventually become the Black diaspora.

Francisco de Miranda, the eventual dictator of Cuba, visited the College of New Jersey at what is now Princeton and was impressed. Then he visited Queen’s College, which is now Rutgers, but did not mention it in his writings. This was not the first time a visitor praised the College of New Jersey but ignored Queen’s College.

The war had destroyed most college campuses. The postwar university structure was a mess. The profits and labor of the slave trade provided funds to repair the schools and allowed the US to establish new public and private colleges, which excluded Black people.

A man knocks on Laymon’s grandmother’s door. He is Albert Payton, Laymon’s great-grandfather. Kiese sleeps in a room with him that night at her grandmother’s request to keep him from stealing. Albert has a bulb of cotton and a small pistol in his pocket. When he is asleep, Laymon feels the bulb of cotton. She thinks of all the damage the cotton industry has caused to Black lives. She knows that it has something to do with Albert’s rough, gnarled hands.

30 years later, she still has the bulb, which “helps me imagine. It helps me wake up. It helps me fight. It helps me realize that there are a million ways to win. But in this country, they’re all rooted in Black bodies, Black deaths, Black imaginations, Black families. And cotton” (172).

In Wallace, Louisiana, the ceramic heads of 55 black men sit on stakes. Ten of them have names; they are the “leaders of the largest slave rebellion in US history” (173). Charles Deslondes led the rebellion in January of 1811, buoyed by the success of the Haitian Revolution. Between 1791 and 1804, Haitian enslaved people overthrew their French masters and formed “the first Black-led republic in the world” (174).

After months of planning, Deslondes led hundreds of organized enslaved people on various plantation attacks. Within 48 hours armed troops stopped them. The punishments and restrictions on Black people that followed were brutal. This rebellion receives little attention, especially compared to the uprisings led by John Brown and Nat Turner.

Smith studies the heads and finds no comfort. He recalls that Louisiana became a state in 1812 and was a slave state until the end of the Civil War.

Willis writes, “To be Black and to be a gender or sexual minority is to carry a mixture of identities that have been chronicled historically in a piecemeal manner” (177). Because words like lesbian and transgender didn’t exist then, it is hard to find documentation of people fitting their descriptions. Most gender and sexual nonconformists were documented only through records of the punishments they received.

Willis provides evidence of various instances of Africans with alternative sexual and gender lifestyles. She writes, “African homosexuality is neither random nor incidental—it is a consistent and logical feature of African societies and belief systems” (177).

Willis believes that most gender and sexuality struggles today are “legacies of that period” (179), particularly for Black Americans who are already part of one oppressed group.

Reed’s poem focuses on several unjust acts perpetrated on Black Americans, including the killing of Amadou Diallo and the imprisonment of the Central Park Five. It also highlights the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings while also holding enslaved people:

Tom couldn’t keep his children out of sight

He was a founding father all right

Sally Hemings wasn’t the only one

There were at least two others by whom

He had daughters and sons

They weren’t treated like the other

Slaves (181).