PREFACE
Natchez is a small southern city perched on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in southwest Mississippi across the river from Concordia Parish, Louisiana. Tourists have historically flocked to visit the town’s large collection of antebellum houses during what is known as “Pilgrimage,” when white women in hoop skirts open their doors to the public and tell tales of “bygone days” to visitors. Until quite recently, public history in Natchez largely omitted the stories of those who created the massive wealth generated by cotton cultivation. This was a glaring oversight considering that Natchez and Adams County had a population of more than 14,000 enslaved African Americans compared to some 6,000 whites in 1860. Free Black people in the census that year numbered 225, the largest population in Mississippi, but nonetheless a tiny fraction of the total. Public historians and institutions in Natchez have increased attention toward the stories of Black history as evidenced by the local Museum of African American History and Culture, an interpretative display for the historic slave market, the Forks of the Road, and other commemoration sites of Black Natchez. In many ways, though, the story of Natchez’s history remains lopsided.1
One of these Black public history sites centers on the life story of the free Black “barber of Natchez” brought to light by the scholars William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis in a 1954 publication of the same name. Davis and Hogan also published and edited what they called William Johnson’s Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary of a Free Negro, Johnson’s remarkable diary kept from 1835 to 1851. In 1990, the National Park Service acquired and renovated the house that Johnson’s family owned up until 1976. In 2005, they opened the William Johnson House as a museum. Tourist literature also frequently references Johnson and links him to other historic sites around town. Because William is the most well-known of the Johnsons, the Johnson name and Black freedom in Natchez have been represented by a male countenance. Shifting the focus from William to the women in his family, however, reveals that his rise to prominence was built on a feminine foundation. This change in perspective allows us to ask new questions about the Johnsons: How did the Natchez of his mother, Amy Johnson, differ from William’s Natchez? Or his daughter Anna’s? How does the Johnson family—and the role of women in it—compare to other free families of color?2
Figure 1. Pilgrimage brochure, Bontura, 1941. This image is a typical depiction of the public history that was historically presented during Pilgrimage. Its name, up until recently, erased the full history of the house, which Robert Smith, a free man of color, had constructed. It has since been renamed the Smith-Bontura-Evans House to more fully capture its history. From the William E. Stewart Collection, courtesy of the Historic Natchez Foundation.
Figure 2. William Johnson House, photo ca. 1906. The home remained in the family until it was sold to the Ellicott Hill Preservation Society, which then donated it to the National Park Service. It is now a museum. Dr. Thomas H. Gandy and Joan W. Gandy Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.
The chronicle of Amy Johnson and her family showcases a mercurial rise from its origins stained by sexual exploitation and punctuated by periodic violence to becoming one of the leading free families of color in Natchez, Mississippi. Amy was born enslaved in Natchez around 1784. When she was in her early twenties, she gave birth to a daughter, Adelia. Three years later, she had another child, William. Her owner, William Johnson, was the father of both her children. In 1814, Amy and Johnson traveled across the Mississippi River to Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where she was manumitted at the age of thirty. Five months after she was emancipated, a white man beat Amy in the typical fashion that an enslaved person might experience violent punishment: he whipped her with a cowhide on her shoulder and breast. He then went one step further and threw her to the ground, “beating—kicking, and stamping to her very great injury & damage.”3 Amy went on to experience several other violent public beatings by both Black and white men within the first five years of her newfound freedom. Her children remained enslaved until the ages of eleven and thirteen, when their father also freed them.4
Figure 3. William Johnson. There has been some question as to whether this photographic portrait shows Johnson himself or one of his sons or grandsons. Courtesy of Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.
The Johnson family thrived economically in the years following their transition to freedom, in part because Amy peddled goods to support herself and her children. In the 1820s, James Miller, a young free barber of color, journeyed from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to build a career in Natchez. After a period of courtship, James married Amy’s daughter, Adelia, and shortly thereafter, the couple departed for New Orleans to seek better opportunities. Before they left, James trained the young William in the lucrative profession of barbering and sold him his thriving business. Over the course of his life, Amy’s son married a free woman of color, Ann Battles, and the couple raised ten children. They acquired a home in town, a plantation, and three barbershops, leaving a visible footprint on the landscape in which they lived. Amy’s family were also enslavers, owning more than thirty men and women at various times prior to the Civil War. They also enjoyed security and protection against the sporadic hostility that most other free people of color endured in periods of community-wide “witch hunts” that often ended with free Blacks imprisoned, deported out of the state, or reenslaved.5
Figure 4. Anna L. Johnson, ca. 1880. Ann and William Johnson’s oldest daughter, born in 1841, took charge of the family after her mother’s death in 1865. She and her younger sister, Katherine, were both schoolteachers in their adulthood. Courtesy of Dr. Thomas H. Gandy, Natchez, Mississippi.
The stark reality for the Johnson family, notwithstanding their material success, was that violence was an ever-present specter in their lives. For Amy’s children, Adelia and William, and for at least one of their spouses, Ann, violence laid at the heart of their very existence. All three were conceived when their enslaver fathers sexually exploited their enslaved mothers. The memory of violence, then, was literally imprinted onto their bodies in their biracial skin tones.6 Their freedom was thus built on a foundation of violence. Gendered and racialized violence was a commonplace occurrence throughout Amy’s life, the lives of her family members, as well as in the larger community within which she lived. Ultimately, violence even ended her son’s life when William’s neighbor, a free man of color who was passing as white, murdered him in broad daylight over a property dispute, with William’s son as a witness. In a bizarre twist of fate that underscored the disadvantages that free people of color faced due to racism and structural inequality, the family was unable to successfully press for a conviction against William’s murderer. Amy died two years before her son, in 1849, and did not live to see this miscarriage of justice. In the face of this tragedy, the Johnson family dealt with their grief in their own ways but continued to flourish under the management of the women in the household.7
The narrative outline of Amy Johnson’s family, captured by their personal experiences and interaction with others, demonstrates critical themes of movement, gendered violence, resistance against oppression, and perseverance across the generations. These same themes often intersected in the lives of free people of color in communities across the Deep South. Individual family stories, like the Johnsons’, illustrate the power of using existing personal written documents coupled with traditional public records to recover a glimpse into the multifaceted lives of free black people, who, like the enslaved, usually left behind only scant memoirs.8 As the Johnson story makes clear, freedom and slavery were not mutually exclusive for people of African descent in North America. Throughout the period of enslavement, free people of African descent experienced a contested freedom throughout the generations.