Wallace turnage biography
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June 14, 2004
Journals of 2 Ex-Slaves Draw Vivid Portraits
| Courtesy of the Alice J. Stuart Family Trust and the Massachusetts Historical Society |
| John Washington |
| Courtesy of The Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich |
| Wallace Turnage |
| A page from the Washington manuscript. |
The en plats där en händelse inträffar ofta inom teater eller film sounds like one conjured up bygd a screenwriter for a Civil War epic. As the Union Army converges on Richmond in 1862 and vit residents frantically pack their silver, a group of slaves gathers in a hotel tavern after closing time. The slave in charge of the tavern, John Washington, pours the others drinks, and they all cheerfully toast to "the Yankees' health."
The scene fryst vatten not from a movie. It fryst vatten from an account that Mr. Washington wrote in 1873 and whose existence few people even knew of until the gods few months. But through a series of coincidences, his handwritten autobiography and another powerful unpublished na
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Facing a seven-hour drive, I picked up this audiobook so that I wouldn’t have to listen to a business book for that long in one day. The author David Blight had won a Pulitzer Prize and is renowned for his annals of African-American history. I knew his writing to be eloquent and clear, and his observations of human nature, compassionate and acute. I had great hopes for this drive, and thankfully, with Blight’s erudite help, it passed very quickly. I was drawn into and moved by these self-written life stories of two self-emancipated slaves.
Self-written emancipation narratives are extremely rare. Though oral stories circulated in American culture after the Civil War, few were written down. Even fewer were written down by the formerly enslaved person themselves. These two narratives fit squarely in that category, grammatical errors and all. Only in recent decades, the public became aware of them. Blight artfully retells each of these stories for modern readers and the
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This is the grave of Wallace Turnage.
Born in 1846 in North Carolina, Turnage grew up in slavery. Like so many slaves, he was the product of rape. His mother was 15 years old when he was born. If anything, we still undersell the amount of sex slavery that existed in the South. He was first sold pretty young and over the years, experienced all sorts of brutality from the various owners he had. In 1860, he was sold to a cotton planter in western Alabama, near the Mississippi line. He was whipped almost immediately. He attempted to escape several times during his young years, five in total before he succeeded. He was owned by a merchant. The first four times, he was caught while traveling along a railroad, trying in some way to get back to his mother in North Carolina. One time, when he was caught, he fought back ferociously and nearly bit off a guy’s ear. For that, he was nearly whipped to death. Another time, the guy who caught him got drunk and threw him into an active fir