Page 57 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

42 . The Shadow of Whiteness

bought my grandmother, who was too old to set free, that she might
be exempted from hard servitude in her old age. (Smith et al. 1971,
131)
From other portions of this account, it seems that the sister and brother
who were purchased by Offley's father were still young enough at the
time that a sympathetic auctioneer had "used great deception in making
the purchaser believe that the two children would die unless they could
have their mother's care, so that father bought them at his own price, as
no person bid against him" (132). What is most striking to me about
this account is not that Reverend Offley's free father had managed to
buy his enslaved children (a feat). Rather, it is that their father apparent-
ly retained them in the status of slavery for several years after their pur-
chase, not freeing the girl until age sixteen, the boy when he was twenty.
My assertion that Offley's father kept his children in the status of slavery
hinges on the auctioneer's having convinced the other prospective buy-
ers that the boy and girl could not survive without their mother's care.
The auctioneer could hardly have made these claims effectively about
adolescent children in their teens, since slave children as young as four
years old were often given considerable responsibilities as nurses, spin-
ners, and field hands. One wonders what kind of family dynamics re-
sulted from this situation and one thing is certain: such dynamics were
complex. In this family even freeborn children had brushes with life
under slavery. The freeborn Offley was at nine years old put into ser-
vice with a slaveowner for four years in order to "pay his [father's]
house rent" (132).
Many slave accounts contain observations about the complexity of
consumption when one of the major commodities is human beings
themselves. In one passage Harriet Jacobs recounts her grandmother's
determined efforts to try to save enough money to buy her children's
freedom. At one point, she has saved three hundred dollars, which her
mistress borrows from her and never repays, since such an obligation
would never be recognized by the court: "a slave being property can
hold no property" (12). Jacobs continues,
When her mistress died, her son-in-law, Dr. Flint, was appointed ex-
ecutor. When grandmother applied to him for payment, he said the
estate was insolvent, and the law prohibited payment. It did not,
however, prohibit him from retaining the silver candelabra, which
had been purchased with that money. I presume they will be handed
down in the family, from generation to generation.