Hope from Hard Stories
Some historians, like fiction writers, set their work deeply and exclusively in a specific locale, but what they have to say transcends those bounds as much as Eudora Welty’s short stories transcended her circumscribed life in Jackson, Mississippi. North Carolina is blessed to have such a historian in David Cecelski, who has mined both the archives of the eastern United States and the memories of eastern North Carolina to write beautifully about people making a living on and along the creeks, sounds, bays, and swamps of our coast since the eighteenth century. David has focused his work especially on North Carolinians of more recently African descent than the rest of us, a people whom other North Carolinians, like other Americans of recent European descent more broadly, have consistently gone out of their way to marginalize and abuse, perpetuating unnecessary misery for both them and the rest of us when life is hard enough without making it worse. David doesn’t shy away from telling the truth of that history at all, but he does not write pity or dwell on suffering for its own sake. He is interested in the stories of individual and family resilience and ingenuity that well up from black water and push to rise above the miasma of willfully dysfunctional human societies.
I first found David’s work before I had decided to pursue professional historical scholarship myself; in fact, The Waterman’s Song gave me a firm but welcome shove in that direction. Subtitled Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina, the book opens a world where people other people did not consider people did what people do in a place never fully tamed: seek autonomy, make their way on the land and water, take for themselves what other people don’t want them to have. David makes the reader well-aware of his sources without letting that get in the way of the story he is telling. When I read what he could produce from those sources, it sparked a desire new to me: to explore the leavings of the past for stories to tell in the present.
When scholars have breaks between the demands of our own work, we read. I just read another of David’s books, Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War. As I told him afterward, I generally shy away from such topics. I grew up in the South in the 70s and 80s. I hate white racists, in a visceral way that took root in formative years and deepened with growing historical consciousness. I don’t like having that hatred conjured any more than the last six years of U.S. political life have already done. Hatred is not constructive; it does not motivate us to contribute to the solution of problems. It’s just poison. I knew what I’d find in Fire of Freedom, and I knew it would bring up the most bloody-minded, homicidal version of me. I also trusted David, though, to tell a story that would punch through that, and that trust was well-placed. He always brought me back from my time-traveling flaming-sword fantasies to the real story of a remarkable real man who defied staggering real odds to fight effectively for the liberation of his people and the victory of the United States over the Confederacy.
He was born and raised in Smithville (now Southport), just south of here, and he lived as a young man on N. 4th St., nineteen blocks west of my house, before escaping slavery and becoming a spy for the U.S. Army. He was tough, proud, and unyielding, but he was funny and laughed easily. President Lincoln sent a personal secret emissary to negotiate with escaped former slaves at New Bern, hoping to recruit them for the Army. Galloway and his compadres met with him and took him seriously. They also held pistols to his head to “persuade” him to sign a pledge to them.
Galloway went on to be a State Senator from here in Wilmington. He always carried a pistol and never backed down. He fought the white racists from the podium during the day and in the streets at night. He died young, but a respected husband and father, and his funeral was huge.
Then we know what happened; it was already happening when Galloway died. Supremacy was reclaimed by the scum for themselves, and the rest of the country let it happen, because most of the rest of the country was racist too. Galloway’s story, well-known in his own day, was erased, as the white South re-wrote history to suit its own pathologies. That didn’t have to happen that way; it was a choice.
And yet, Galloway’s story is real, and David wrote it, and the University of North Carolina published it. He is not erased, after all, and neither are the stories of people like him and the life-and-death struggle they fought for basic justice and decency. And just as Galloway did not fight alone, David is not alone in writing this history; historians both academic and public are paying proper attention to, for example, the 1898 Wilmington coup, so brutally effective that this city’s black population is still abnormally low for a coastal Southern port.
David and I agreed that living with this material all day for months on end (a decade for him, for Fire of Freedom) takes a toll. As much as I love a good nature documentary after dinner, sometimes I can’t watch another one about how we’re destroying everything; after a day “in the history trenches,” as David put it, I need relief and escape. For him, writing a foodways series for his blog and learning about North Carolina’s traditional small watercraft lightened the load.
And that leads me to why I wrote what you’re reading now. The best thing about Fire of Freedom, for me personally, is that, despite the ugliness in it—the horror, even—and even given that the end of the story is not a good one—the good guys don’t win in the end, and the struggle goes on, even now—the story doesn’t lead to despair. I didn’t finish the book and throw up my hands and shake my head. Yes, I was angry, but there was more than that. The part of the story that reinforced my misanthropy was balanced by the part that pushes hard against it—in fact, the latter won out, even if by just a little bit. That is exactly what I think we are all desperate for right now—and that goes beyond our relationship with history. Intelligent, informed people know what the problems are. We know how bad they are. We know the challenges we face in overcoming them. What we’ve got to have is hope. We’ve got to have somebody smart offering us real possibilities and pointing out real and attainable opportunities to solve these problems. As historians, we have to offer our readers true examples of human resolve and ingenuity in the face of obstacles on a similar scale, without glossing over the hard stuff. Which is exactly what David did in this book.
I want to argue that this goes far beyond our understandable human need to feel better. I think a lot of us are in real danger of being overwhelmed by despair, which is the opposite of what we need. I think that a lot of the things we watch and read and talk about with each other reinforce that, and that must stop. We can’t hide from the truth, but in this moment in history, we had better make sure we put an Abraham Galloway in every story we tell, every documentary we make, every conversation we have about hard things. Self-fulfilling prophecies are a real thing. If we tell ourselves we can’t, we can’t. If we tell ourselves we can, we can—and so that’s what we have to do, and we need stories like Galloway’s to remind us what we can do when we have the resolve and commitment to do it. So thank you, David.
David S. Cecelski, Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (UNC Press, 2012).
David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (UNC Press, 2001).
https://davidcecelski.com/