auction block was a little dais with three or four steps leading up to it which each slave had to mount while the auctioneer read off his name, age, and accomplishments. Josiah’s brothers and sisters exhibited their teeth and muscles, jumped and danced to show their agility and were bid off first. Then his mother was sold to Isaac Riley of Montgomery County, Maryland, and she begged him to buy her Josiah, too, in order that she might not be separated from the last of the children. Since he had no need of the child and refused to buy him, the boy was bought by a man who owned a tavern near Montgomery courthouse some miles away. This man, a tavern owner named Robb, had a line of stagecoaches and owned about forty slaves, among whom he threw the child of six.
Josiah sickened and lay all day on the dirt floor, uncared for by any of the other slaves who were too brutalized by their own treatment to think of bothering with him. He was left all day alone while they were driven out into the fields or about their other work, and, when they returned at night, they threw him a piece of corn bread or a dried herring so long as he could still eat. Soon, however, he was unable to move and lay there near death. By chance, Robb, his new owner, met Riley, who had bought the mother, and offered him the child in return for a payment which was to be made in horseshoeing. Riley agreed, and Josiah was returned to his mother who nursed him back to health.
He grew in Riley’s service and learned all the lessons that a cruel master could teach: “The character and the habits of the slave and the slaveholder were created and perpetuated by their relative position,” says the autobiography, but it was to be more than sixty years before Henson could express himself in that concise and elegant way, if indeed the words were not put into his mouth by a ghost writer. At any rate, he was clever and observant, quick to learn and critical of his environment even as a boy. The slaves on Riley’s place were beasts of the field who huddled ten or a dozen to a pen and slept on the ground. In their log huts were no wooden floors, no furniture but beds made of a heap of rags thrown on the trodden mud and boxed in with a board or two. Henson said of this way of life: “Our favorite way of sleeping, however, was on a plank, our heads raised on an old jacket and our feet toasting before the smoldering fire. The wind whistled and the rain and snow blew in through the cracks while the damp earth soaked up the moisture until the floor was miry as a pigsty.”
The principal food on Riley’s farm was cornmeal and salt herring, to which, in summer, there was added a little buttermilk from the churnings and a few vegetables which were grown in truck patches and tended after dark when the field work was done. There were two regular meals a day: breakfast at twelve, after work since dawn, and a supper when the day was over. In harvest season there were three meals, for then the work was harder and a little dried meat was added to their diet. Clothing was of tow cloth, with only a shirt for children. As they grew up, they were also given a pair of pantaloons or a gown, and in winter a round coat, and a wool hat once in two or three years, and one pair of shoes a year.
Under even these conditions Josiah grew to be strong and agile as a young buck, he says; he could run faster, wrestle better, dance better, jump higher than any of the others on the farm. At fifteen he could outhoe, outreap, outhusk all the other slaves; and he worked all day in the field and ran through the orchard at night with the wild young ones following him, to steal and broil a chicken and plot first-rate tricks to dodge work. Yet he loved to work because it brought him to the notice of the overseer, and praise was dear to him. “One word of commendation from the petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month.” Josiah had not the makings of Uncle Tom for nothing, and there was just one way for a slave to better his lot and that was to move toward the Big House.
If there was another way, the way of escape, Josiah had not yet heard of it, and in all fairness to him it must be said that the means hardly existed at this time. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, individual slaves had begun to escape from the plantations and make their way north to the free states. Many of those who ran away from the slave masters of the deep South marked a trail with their corpses or were caught and returned for punishment, mutilation, or death as an example to their fellows. Means of communication were closely guarded by armed patrols who demanded a pass of any Negro who might, in extraordinary circumstances, be traveling alone. The nature of the country, with its dismal swamps, broad marshes, and savannahs, made any travel, except by the few well-known roads, almost impossible. Nonetheless, some did from the earliest years manage to get to the northern states, as can be proven by the record of several attempts made in the late eighteenth century on the part of slave owners who wished to have their property returned to them. Even during Henson’s boyhood several ex-slaves had managed to make their way to Canada and a more secure freedom beyond the reach of American law, but the legend of the North Star, which led and guided those pushed by a relentless hunger for freedom, had not yet become part of the folklore whispered in the slave quarters of every plantation. One cannot blame young Henson for not knowing that there were sweeter joys than the rare and careless word of praise from the man who cracked the whip; that is, one cannot blame him yet. The fault in his nature, the fissure line along which it can be split, does not become evident until he is an older man. In his boyhood, typical as it was of the slave boy of superior talent and physical endowment, we can trace the causes. Let those who can, read an analogy in the circumstances and social pressures that surround, form, and shape a boy born today into the same racial group, however the legal freedom of that group may have changed in a century or so.
Young Henson would naturally reject the movement to revolt, for his first memory was that of the tragedy to which a movement of revolt had led his father, and one cannot doubt that his mother constantly reminded him of its terrible consequences. She had stood there, calling on her husband to cease beating the overseer, and had persuaded him not to kill the man who had attacked her. She was a religious woman who taught her child that violence was in all cases evil and that one must submit and trust to prayer, and she must have worried over his high-spirited escapades and boyish devilry, thinking that it might lead him to a tragic end.
[[ After undergoing a religious conversion around 1807, Henson became a more submissive and willing worker, rising in influence on the Riley estate until he became overseer. Recognized for his industry and his knowledge of farming and managing property, he supervised his fellow slaves with kindness, always seeking to ease their hardships. Gradually he took over management of the accounts and did all the buying and selling. During this time, having defended his master in a brawl, he was brutally attacked by the overseer of Riley’s brother, Amos; Henson, his arms broken and his shoulder blades smashed, was maimed for life. In 1825 Isaac Riley needed to dodge his creditors, so he asked a favor of his loyal slave: to lead all of his slaves down to Kentucky to his brother’s plantation. Henson succeeded in the perilous journey, proudly keeping his promise and maintaining his sense of moral virtue, even as he rejected opportunities from freed slaves on the Ohio side of the river for them all to seek their freedom. A few years later, Riley decided to sell the slaves he had sent to Kentucky, except Henson, whom he wanted returned. Henson grew determined to buy his freedom and raised most of the money during his trek back to Maryland by preaching on a detour through Ohio. But Riley cheated him out of the deal. Left with nothing but ineffective manumission papers, Henson returned to his family on the Kentucky plantation. Yet even then, in that period of unrest prior to Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831, as a secret plan of revolt gained momentum, he persuaded the slaves to desist from rebellion as an act that was too dangerous and above all not Christian, once again becoming a sort of accomplice in the perpetuation of their misery. ]]
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One day Riley suddenly announced that his young son, who was also called Amos, was going down the river to New Orleans in a flat-bottomed boat full of farm produce. Henson was to go with him, and they were to start the next day and dispose of the cargo to the best advantage. Josiah knew at once what this meant. He was to be sold too. No one said so, but he was sure of it. Rumors of an exchange of letters between the brothers had come from the Big House, and this was the result. Either those two intended turning him into riches without wings and to share the money, or Mr. Amos was stealing a march on his brother. Henson never knew.
He told his
