A HISTORIAN'S 



doors, and windows; even the cooking 

 utensils and furniture within it. 



Parker is like that with everything, and 

 it is this accretion of ordinary details — his 

 diet, clothing, pastimes, religion, music, 

 family — that allows him to distill an 

 essence of slavery far more telling than a 

 litany of atrocities alone. 



Parker had a special awareness of the 

 ways in which his masters relied on African 

 American knowledge of agriculture and the 

 earth. My colleague Peter Wood has 

 documented how West African slaves 

 introduced rice cultivation into the 

 Low Country of South Carolina, a 

 critical step in colonizing the tidewater 

 there and along the Lower Cape Fear. 

 Today's historians share a growing 

 appreciation for the West African roots 

 of agriculture in the early South. 



But Parker seems to be making a 

 broader argument. He is not merely 

 saying that slaves brought knowledge 

 of West African crops to the 

 Americas, but also that they gleaned 

 new lessons out of the American 

 woods, fields, and waters simply by 

 working in them and relying on them 

 far more extensively than did their 

 masters. 



"Being out of doors a great deal 

 of the time, and having no books, [we 

 slaves] learned many things from the 

 book of Nature, which were unknown 

 to white people, notwithstanding their 

 knowledge of books," Parker wrote. 

 "And it often happened that the 

 master would be guided by the slave as to 

 the proper time to plant his corn, sow his 

 grain, or harvest his crops, and many things 

 of this kind, which were to the master a 

 source of care and anxiety, seemed to come 

 to the slave as it were by instinct and not often 

 did they make a mistake in their prophecies." 



This reliance on slaves and their 

 knowledge of the "book of Nature" is 

 scarcely surprising. The men and women 

 who toiled in fields of cotton, tobacco, 

 wheat, and corn — day in and day out, year 

 after year — became intimately acquainted 



with every aspect of cultivation: clearing 

 land, fertilizing, ditching, sowing, weeding, 

 harvesting, selecting new seed for the next 

 crop. Overseers came and went. Planters 

 often were diverted by other business 

 interests, but slaves got their hands dirty 

 sunup to sundown every day — and learned 

 the lessons that the earth had to offer. 



Parker must have learned a great deal 

 about nature when he worked at Darias 

 White's timber camp near the Great Dismal 



These mortars for threshing rice are believed 

 to have been made by slaves in Camden County 



Swamp. There, he drove oxen teams that 

 hauled 100-foot logs out of the swamp to 

 blackwater streams where they could be 

 floated to a sawmill. "I liked this sort of 

 work very well as it was not often hard, and 

 there was a great deal of excitement about 

 it," he remembered. 



That year, Parker was among 40 or so 

 slaves who "camped in the woods through 

 the entire lumber season." They lived in a 

 camp "made of logs, bark and pieces of 

 board, which would enclose the camp on 

 three sides, [and] on the fourth a large fire 



would be built at night." This sort of camp 

 life is not our usual image of slavery, but it 

 was very common in the timber, shingle- 

 making and naval stores industries. Slaves 

 like Parker developed a unique knowledge 

 of the forest ecology from spending months 

 in such camps. 



Whether in swamp or field, the slaves 

 were intimately bound to the "book of 

 Nature." They related to nature in a way that 

 was different from their masters. For 

 instance, planters told time with 

 watches and clocks. "The slaves," 

 Parker wrote, "were obliged to 

 depend upon the sun, moon, and stars 

 and other things in nature." 



Of course, Parker and his 

 enslaved brethren did not utilize their 

 familiarity with the "book of Nature" 

 only to raise their masters' crops and 

 cut their timber. They frequently 

 employed the same knowledge to 

 weaken the grip of bondage on their 

 lives. The slaves — depended upon 

 by the planters for their knowledge of 

 agriculture, fishing, and forest 

 industries — thus achieved at least a 

 small shift in their favor in the never- 

 ending power struggle between 

 master and slave. 



Just as they learned to rely on the 

 moon and stars in the absence of 

 mechanical clocks, so Albemarle 

 slaves looked in ingenious ways to 

 their natural environment to improve 

 and vary their food rations — and 

 gain a small but important foothold 

 outside their masters' households. Parker 

 described, for instance, how slaves turned 

 pine needles and small twigs into tea and 

 made coffee out of burnt com and wheat. 



Albemarle slaves also enriched their 

 diets with wild game. "Night," Parker wrote, 

 "was the slave's holiday." It was no accident 

 that he devoted a long chapter of Recollec- 

 tions to how slaves hunted raccoons, 

 opossums, and other nocturnal game. "The 

 slaves believed that the wild game was 

 intended for them," he observed, "for while 

 the master was enjoying his roast beef or 



HIGH SEASON 2000 



