E-mail a friendGretchen Holbrook Gerzina
airdate May 2, 2008
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina always knew she wanted to be a writer. She's the author/editor of several nonfiction books, including Carrington, Black London and, her latest, Mr. and Mrs. Prince, the story of two former slaves who became landowners and public figures. She's the first woman to chair Dartmouth's English department and the first African American woman to do so in the Ivy League. She also hosts a nationally-syndicated radio program, The Book Show. Gerzina holds a Ph.D. from Stanford.
Author describes the differences between slavery in the American South and in New England. (1:14)
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
Tavis: Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the Chair of the English Department at Dartmouth, the first African American woman to head an English Department at an Ivy League school. She is also the host of the syndicated program, "The Book Show" on radio and an author herself whose latest book is called "Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend." Professor Gerzina, nice to have you on the program.
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina: Oh, it's wonderful to be here.
Tavis: Good to see you. How you been?
Gerzina: I've been great.
Tavis: This is a wonderful piece of work here. There's some basic questions I want to ask to get us into our conversation. First of all, it is about a couple who were at one point enslaved?
Gerzina: That's right.
Tavis: The first question for me is how one goes about researching slavery? Because it's not like paperwork is just laying around for you to, you know, to say, "Come find us." How do you research slaves?
Gerzina: Well, it depends where they were. These people were living in the eighteenth century and they were living in New England. We think about slavery as being in the south and being big plantations and that's hard enough, but a century before, it's even harder. What I had to do was really go to the tiny little records, town clerk's offices, ledger books where people kept records of what people bought and sold. People didn't show up with their own names too often, so it was a lot of work.
Tavis: So tell me who Mr. and Mrs. Prince were.
Gerzina: Well, Lucy Terry Prince, she is known to be the first known African American poet ahead of Phillis Wheatley. She was famous because she went to court, she fought for her rights, she fought for the land that she lived on when people were trying to steal it from her. There were legends that she went before the Supreme Court of the United States and argued for her land.
Tavis: And the Mr.?
Gerzina: Ah, Abijah Prince. I'm really very fond of him. He was her husband, twenty-five years older than she was. One of the wonderful finds of the book was that he actually managed to get himself freed before he married her and then probably helped her to her own freedom. They owned two hundred acres of land and they became landowners and farmers and he taught her a lot. They had a wonderful marriage.
Tavis: Tell me more about the story of his navigating his way to freedom.
Gerzina: Well, that was a hard thing to try to find. There was a legend that said that he had gotten his freedom from some good white people who had known him. He had been a slave for forty years. What my husband and I discovered in the book was that he went and joined the Army in the French & Indian War, got some money and probably engineered his freedom by getting someone to buy him out and then set him free.
Tavis: He is not set free until about age fifty, as I recall?
Gerzina: Yeah, he's about fifty years old. To imagine that you lived as he did for forty years on a farm in the back of beyond in a rural, rural part of New England where there were no other slaves, maybe one person five miles away, and somehow live there thinking that this was gonna be your whole life. Then, lo and behold, he later gets married, he has six children, he becomes a landowner, he becomes a registered voter. He ends up doing a life that he probably never had thought possible.
Tavis: How'd he connect with Lucy?
Gerzina: She lived in a town called Deerfield that was probably fifteen miles away. He probably met her as she was growing up. She was a slave in that town. I'm sure that one day he walked in after the wars and took a look at her and she's now twenty-five years old and he thinks, "I can have a whole life." She had been working in a tavern. She was a slave and, I think, he just found her a remarkable woman.
Tavis: How does he, after navigating himself to freedom, help her to get free? How does that work back then?
Gerzina: Well, actually, it's very hard to find out. There are no records of it. What I think happened is, she's listed as a slave when they get married. A year later, she has her first baby and she is free. We think that she probably got bought out. I think he took some of the money he earned in the war and probably just paid her owners off. They lived in that town for quite a long time and she was never a slave again.
Tavis: All right, so help me understand how - you know, the story's remarkable, but made remarkable I think most for me by the journey of how they end up being landowners. Not just one or two acres, but to your point -
Gerzina: - yeah, two hundred acres, yeah. You know, back in New England, people got land grants. Land was free. Land was plentiful. It was what everybody wanted and everybody needed. He managed to get himself on some grants when people were saying, "All right, Governor, a hundred of us got together. We signed this petition. Will you give us land and we'll start a town?"
He managed to get his name on some of those things. He also just knew the right people. He worked for some people and he probably worked with them to get some property that he could later own. We know he owned it because he later sold it and we have a deed.
Tavis: What did they do with the land?
Gerzina: They were farmers, they were farmers. Actually, one of the hardest things in this book is that I say that I was trying to find a net. You know, I'm trying to find the strings that hold the holes together because there's so many things that you can't know in a story like this. How did she get from Africa? How did she get free? Did she go to court and how do people find records of that?
We were able to find court dockets that proved that they were in court all the time fighting for their rights. We were able to find their medical records and find out what happened to them and then later to find out what happened to their children. All of that is outside of regular libraries. You know, it's in tiny little places.
Tavis: You say fighting for their rights. They were in court most often fighting for what? Holding on to their land?
Gerzina: Well, that was a big one. That was the biggest one. I mean, little things. Neighbors took neighbors to court all the time. If you owed somebody two dollars, they might take you to court. But we found out that they went to court because, in Vermont with their first hundred acres, some neighbors hired someone to beat up their youngest children who were ten and fourteen. They took them to court.
We found that other people were trying to run them off their land. They were putting animals on their land. They set fire to their hayricks. They took them to court. They went to the Governor and Council, Lucy did, and got an order of protection so that no one could steal her property from her and the Governor and Council, who were the supreme executive body. They said, "You have to protect these people. They are citizens of your state and you have to protect them."
Tavis: So they weren't just going to court back in the day. They were actually winning cases.
Gerzina: Absolutely, absolutely. And we weren't even sure if they were literate or not. We found his signatures. We found evidence of her memorizing the Bible. So we know that they knew an awful lot.
Tavis: And as an English professor, that was my next question. How literate do we think they were?
Gerzina: Well, you know, you don't know. She's a poet. Her poems weren't written down, but I found evidence of them buying school books. They bought things like little primers to teach their children how to read and write. We found his signature on a number of documents. He bought eyeglasses and inkwells, so they were clearly learning how to read and write.
Tavis: How different was slavery in New England versus slavery in the south?
Gerzina: That is such a good question because we think of slavery as being so different. Where they lived in the countryside, there were a lot of slaves. People thought there weren't any. In their little tiny town, thirty-eight percent of the houses on the main street had slaves living in them.
But slaves could at that time go into the shops and have an account. They went to church and they were baptized. They were forced to go to church. They had to sit up in the gallery behind a curtain, but they were forced to go to church. They could move around. They had guns. They went hunting. They served in the militias.
But I don't want anybody to think that that was a lesser form of slavery. You know, their children could still be sold. They could still be taken away and sent away someplace. They could be worked to death. They could be hired out. All of those things still made them slaves with this kind of veneer, some kind of freedom of movement.
Tavis: But even in the church, they had to sit up in the gallery behind a curtain.
Gerzina: Yeah, with the Indians. Everybody of color had to sit up there. They were forced to go to church because, you know, God told them they had to be good servants and they had to go to church.
Tavis: What do we know about the children?
Gerzina: They had six children. We tracked them all down. One of them married a white woman. They had three children who got known later on as the "white Negroes." One of them died very young, one was a traveling musician. He served in the Revolution along with his older brother, served in the Revolutionary War, but they probably know some of the big names. One of them was at West Point when the whole Benedict Arnold thing blew up. So they were Americans.
I think that's the point of this book. We think of America as being, you know, the kind of Johnny Tremain story, you know, all of those people who were good patriots. We have to really open it up and think they were Black people who were living there. They were settlers, they were populating the countryside, they were serving in the Army. They were doing all these things that everybody else was doing.
Tavis: After working so hard and going to court to fight to hold onto it, to your earlier point, they ended up selling the land?
Gerzina: Well, he died. He was getting old. When she went to court and they were having their property threatened, he was in his eighties and she was sixty years old. So finally after that, they sold. They stayed there for several years and he died when he was eighty-eight. She moved across the state with her remaining children and found that the land they thought they owned there was under dispute and she had to spend the next eight years in court all over again to get it back.
Tavis: So after all that, the land didn't get passed on generationally?
Gerzina: They won their case. They won their case, so it did pass on. It got passed on in the sense that they got a settlement and then the town gave them a place to live for the next many years.
Tavis: It's a fascinating story. It's called "Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and Into Legend," written by Professor Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina of Dartmouth. Professor, congratulations. Nice to have you on the program. It's good to see you.
Gerzina: Oh, it was a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.
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