As far as Johnson was able to discover, he was born August 7, 1836, in Rock-Rayman in the State of Virginia, USA. All he knew of his ancestry was that his maternal grandfather was of the Guinea tribe in Africa and that he and his wife had died still relatively young. Johnson’s mother had been born into slavery and was separated from her brothers and sisters at the age of 13.
Johnson’s father was an octoroon, ie only an eighth African and a freeman, but the law of the time said that if either parent was a slave, you were too, so he was born a slave. When he was three his owner, a Mr Brent, moved to Alexandria, a suburb of Washington DC. Johnson’s father wanted to buy his family out of slavery but Brent refused. Six years later Johnson Senior died. Though he apparently left money for his son to redeem himself it fell into the wrong hands.
Reminiscing on younger days Johnson could remember a time when he did not realise he was a slave and happily played, unaware of his sorry situation. However, from time to time companions would disappear. Virginia, in economic decline at this point, had a surplus of slaves. One of its more profitable enterprises was selling them to slaveholders from the Deep South, where there was a cotton boom. Cotton plantations used large numbers of slaves. Thomas soon learned about ‘Georgia traders’ and other slave dealers. Whenever he and other slave children saw a white man look over the fence they would instinctively run and hide. The little African-American children soon learned how different their lot was to that of the white children growing up in the same houses.
When 7 or 8, Johnson’s owner moved to Washington DC itself to work for the government. Thomas’s job was to keep flies away at meals and bring his young master’s slippers to him at night. We get an idea of the ignorance in which such slaves lived when Johnson tells how impossible he found it to understand the difference between right and left, despite several slaps on the head for what his young master believed was wilful ignorance.
His mother seems to have been a loving, God-fearing woman to the degree she was able. Her education consisted of being able to recite the alphabet and count to a hundred. She taught Thomas the Lord’s Prayer and described heaven as a place where everyone was free. ‘Oh, I used to think’ writes Johnson, ‘how nice it must be in heaven, no slaves, all free, and God would think as much of the black as he did of the white.’ She told him how their ancestors had once been free in Africa but that white men had stolen them away. She explained to him that the way to freedom was to learn to read and write. However, he would have to do this secretly as draconian laws were in place forbidding the education of slaves. In many places slaves were not even allowed to attend Sunday Schools. Mrs Johnson had no access to a Bible and spoke often of fortune and luck but she did urge her son to pray and seek religion. In his old age Johnson fondly remembered her.
‘I do thank my blessed Jesus that she knew so much; it was the germ of all I know today. My mother’s advice and my mother’s teaching will ever remain fresh in my memory. I cannot forget her tears as she looked upon me with a mother’s love ... and told me what little she knew. ... I remember her tenderness, and the deep security I felt when, in the evenings of my childhood, nestling in her arms, I listened as she told me how she loved me, not knowing what was passing through that loving mother’s breast as her tearful eyes looked upon me.’
Following a change in circumstances Johnson’s mother paid for him to have reading lessons in secret. However, when it was discovered, he was sent further south to work on a farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Following his master’s death, he was moved north again to Fairfax County under the young master who by this stage was trained as a medical doctor. Still only 12, Johnson missed his mother greatly. He was often beaten for the slightest things and continued efforts were made to prevent him from gaining any sort of education.
At the time, most slaves were treated in appalling ways. Not a day went by without one or other being whipped. They were pledged, leased, exchanged, taken for debt, even gambled away sometimes. Families were regularly split up at auction. It may give us some idea just how badly African-Americans were treated by the majority white population when we realise that it was generally thought by them that Queen Victoria was black. This idea gained currency because it was known that there was freedom for slaves in the north of the continent, in the British Dominion of Canada. By 1840 as many as 15,000 slaves had escaped there by ‘Underground Railroad’ a system of safe houses that secretly provided help for runaways on the journey north. The idea of a kind white queen was inconceivable!
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