The reasons were two. One of them was that in the middle 1700s in Virginia, almost all slaves were sold at auction. A male slave in good condition would bring on the average about $750. At the end of every slave auction they would have what they called the scrap sale, and those who were incapacitated, ill, or otherwise not so valuable for market, would be sold generally for amounts of $100 or less in cash. This particular African managed to survive and then to convalesce, and he posed then to his master an economic question. His master decided that he was crippled and hobbled about, but could still do limited work. The master decided that he would be worth more kept on that plantation than he would be worth sold away for cash of less than $100. That was how it happened that this particular African was kept on one plantation for quite a long period of time.

Now that came at a time when, if there was any single thing that probably characterized slaves, it was that they had almost no sense of what we today know and value and revere as family continuity. The reason simply was that slaves were sold back and forth so much. Characteristically slave children would grow up without an awareness of who their parents were, and particularly male parents. This African, now kept on the plantation by his master’s decision, hobbling about and doing the limited work he could, finally met and mated with another slave on that plantation, and her name (in the stories told by my grandmother and the others on the front porch in Henning) was Bell the big house cook. Of that union was born a little girl who was given the name Kizzy. As Kizzy got to be four or five or so, this African would take that little girl by the hand, and he would take her around and point to various natural objects, and he would tell her the name for that thing – tree, rock, cow, sky, so forth. The names that he told her were instinctively in his native tongue, and to the girl they were strange phonetic sounds which in time, with repetitive hearing, the girl could repeat. He would point at a guitar and he would make a single sound as if it were spelled ‘ko’. She came in time to know that ko was guitar in his terms. There were other strange phonetic sounds for other objects. Perhaps the most involved of them was that contiguous to the plantation there was a river, and whenever this African would point out this river to his daughter Kizzy he would say to her ‘Kamby Bolongo’. She came to know that Kamby Bolongo in his terms meant river.

There was another thing about this African which is in the background of all the Black people in this country, that was whoever bought them off the slave ship, when they got them to a plantation, their first act was giving them an Anglicized name. For all practical purposes that was the first step in the psychic dehumanization of an individual or collectively of a people. In the case of this particular African his master gave him the name Toby. But whenever any of the other adult slaves would address him as Toby, this African would strenuously rebuff and reject it and he would tell them his name was ‘Kin-tay’, a sharp, angular two- syllabic sound that the little girl Kizzy came to know her father said was his name.

There was yet another thing about this African characteristic of all those original Africans in our background, that they had been brought from a place where they spoke their native tongue, and brought to this place where it became necessary to learn English for sheer survival’s sake. Gradually, haltingly, all those original Africans learned a word here, a phrase there, of the new tongue – English. As this process began to happen with this African, and he began to be able to express himself in more detailed ways, he began to tell his little daughter Kizzy little vignettes about himself. He told her, for instance, how he had been captured. He said that he had not been far away from his village chopping wood to make himself a drum when he had been set upon by four men, overwhelmed, and taken thusly into slavery. She came to know along with many other stories the story of how he was chopping wood when he was captured.