On fugitivity and self-liberation
Inside the project to archive runaway slave ads at the AAS
Hello hello! Coming to you a few days early this week because I’m headed for the Deerfield River for a weekend of camping and floating and drinking and eating and all other manner of woodland fun.
It’s been a great week of Worcester Sucks postings make sure you’ve read up: On Tuesday we put up the second edition of Liz Goodfellow’s Worcester Speaks! column featuring Jake Dziejma and Aislinn Doyle’s July edition of WPS In Brief. And then yesterday of course there was Shaun Connolly’s Bad Advice, which this week veered into the territory of financial advice, something our legal team is not stoked about.
As always, the only reason this post and all those posts are in your inbox and not behind any sort of paywall is paying subscribers. Please consider becoming a patron of real fearless independent local journalism and if you already are, thank you so much :-)
In today’s post, I open with a rare human interest feature, then get to my usual stuff like shitting on local Nazis and complaining about our Republican governor and observing fascism sweep the nation. (A new feature I’m trying out: Each link below takes you straight to the subhead of the relevant section).
Freedom on the move—Maura Healey destroys Right To Shelter—Patriot Frump—Netanyahu’s clash of civilizations—odds and ends
First, a palate cleanser:
Fugitivity and self-liberation
Tashia and I are in the basement of the American Antiquarian Society on a recent afternoon. They walk me over me to a huddle of cubicles where a half dozen of their colleagues pore through what look like ancient, crumbling tomes, set carefully between foam cradles under adjustable LED lamps.
These aren’t, as appearances suggest, codexes of dark arcana—not quite. They’re bound collections of centuries-old American newspapers. These researchers are scouring them for one particular feature: runaway slave advertisements.
Before slavery was abolished in this country, the Fourth Estate was heavy into the business of re-connecting property owners with their missing human property.
Tashia grabs a particularly decrepit volume—1818-1819 issues of The Daily National Intelligencer—and carefully places it between the wedges on their desk. Before opening it, they tells me to grab a mask from a nearby supply shelf. The bound collections, some sitting in the AAS archives untouched for decades, contain “all sorts of weird ancient mold,” they say, and people tend to come down with some manner of severe sinus pain.
As they gently pry it open, I ask if they’re afraid it’ll just crumble on the spot. “Oh, it will.”
Off the clock at this particular time, Tashia’s giving me a small snapshot of what they and their colleagues have been doing for months now in four-hour shifts. Tashia opens to a page, scanning the columns of the broadsheet with their finger. They tell me they’re looking for keywords like “notice,” “sheriff sell,” “was committed”—the most obvious one being “reward.”
It doesn’t take long to find one. Tashia taps on a short paragraph entry: “This is Nell, he was committed to jail.” The entry offers a description: 5 foot 8 and a half, belonging to one Rebecca Wheems. Whichever jail Nell happened to be in had submitted the entry so that Rebecca Wheems could come reclaim her property.
When Tashia or one of their colleagues finds a runaway slave ad like this, they take a picture with their phone and log it into a spreadsheet on their laptop. The end result of this process, repeated thousands of times over in archives like the AAS around the country, is the Freedom On The Move database, a website that compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place.”
These ads now serve a purpose much different from those the newspapers and the jailers and the aggrieved property owners first intended. “Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people,” the website reads. Researchers at several universities (Cornell, Ohio State, and the Universities of New Orleans, Alabama, and Kentucky).
To date, the project has compiled roughly 32,000 runaway slave ads, all available in a database on the website. They estimate there are 200,000 or so ads to uncover, at least according to their press release. In any case, much more work to do by people like Tashia in basements like that of the AAS.
The AAS has emerged as a central hub for Freedom on the Move—the “Green Building” on Park Ave that everyone drives by but almost no one goes in is home to some 2.5 million newspapers, most of which are pre-Civil War and a good number of which are “only known copy” status. It’s one of the best collections in the entire country—a vast treasure trove of historical primary source material ironically located in one of the country’s least literate & most history-adverse (or, at least, agnostic) cities (citation not needed).
It was a treat to see how this work gets done, right here in our backyard. More later, but I met Tashia by a combination of pure chance and the “small world” effect produced by the relative few number of bars in this city worth patronizing. A recent graduate of Duke University, Tashia’s from North Carolina, and only in Worcester this summer because that’s where the work happens to be. They hold a degree in African American Studies from Duke, where the Dismal Swamp was one of their primary research subjects.
At their basement cubicle in the AAS, Tashia lets me in on a few tips and tricks. A big one, with major through lines to the present day: “Always check the crime section.” Sometimes, the ads are tucked in news stories. Gently pulling over a few pages, they show me one they found the other day. “Like this,” they say, tapping an entry headlined “Shocking murder.” (“Sensationalism has always been a thing with newspapers,” they say.)
“Here an enslaved man murdered his enslaver and then ran away which is kinda dark,” they say, “but it’s like an ad within this big sensationalist story...”
The man’s name is Randolph, the reward is $300, and the description includes that “his shoulders are broad and stout,” “in walking his toes turn out,” a lost joint, a scar. This is information about Randolph provided for the benefit of slave catchers. But it’s also the only information about Randolph in the historical record.
The newspaper writes, “It is hoped every good citizen will aid in bringing this monster in human shape, to condign (?) punishment.” (Nice to see the newspapers were just as objective back then.)
Finding a place where we won’t disturb their colleagues, we sit down for an interview in a room used as a waiting area for tours. As Tashia speaks, they sit in front of some of the AAS’s most prized possessions in well-lit shadow boxes. To the left of them is a lithograph of Phillis Wheatley Peters and an artful map of the Mississippi. The conversation quickly turns back to Randolph.
“I'm like, what did this guy do to where you wanted to murder him and burn him outside of the fact that he enslaved you and maybe your family before you and your family after you,” they say. “I would say that's reason enough.”
Randolph is just one of many people from the past Tashia has become acquainted with during this work. Another was Barbara.
“There was this woman named Barbara who was called the best cook in America. She's the best cook servant, whatever. He says, we need her back. And it's around the holidays that they're like, we need her back right now.”
One of the most dynamic stories Tashia’s come across is that of a man named Frisby. Honestly, it could be a novel.
In Tashia’s research, Frisby kept appearing over and over, each time accruing a larger total reward sum.
“It eventually gets to 500 I think because he’s been on the run for so long,” they say.
Reading from one of his entries, Tashia recounts that Frisby escaped while “on the march” from Bowling Green, Virginia to Ohio. He’s described as “very Black,” the property of a colonel, 5 foot 8 and stout, 35 years of age with a few gray hairs. He was apprehended in Pennsylvania, put on a ship to New Orleans. He escaped the ship only to be caught again. Then he escaped again. He may be in Pennsylvania or Maryland, the ad reads, and “he'll endeavor to pass as a free man and will no doubt produce documents made by himself for that purpose.”
At one moment, Tashia looks over at the lithograph of Wheatley—in script around the border of the image, it’s made quite clear that she is “servant to” a white man—and I think to myself that I’ll never be able to understand what work like this could mean to an African-American person. Genealogy is a thing I can take for granted, my ancestry consisting of immigrants from Ireland and Germany. Abused as they may have been, they were allowed their history. If they were ever written about is beyond me, but I can safely assume that, if they were, they had a personhood in the narrative. They were not de facto property.
Tashia recounts trying to help their grandmother look into their family history, and only being able to trace it back to 1910—“that’s 60 years after emancipation.”
“Any historian around African American history will tell you that the record keeping of enslaved people is very sparse and often incorrect,” they say.
And that’s exactly why the information collected here is important, and deserving of the time and attention to do it correctly (more on that later).
“And so I think it provides people a kind of look into these incredibly intimate details of people's lives and where they were and where they may have gone.”
It’s a cross reading of a fraught history—an attempt to pull the human out of something that is intentionally dehumanizing.
“Perception and ideas at this time are incredibly racist, and these people are perceiving human beings as their property. And there's militias who later turned into the American police force who are going out and chasing down these people.”
But it also reveals a complexity.
“So we know their ideas around race, but we also see ship captains who are harboring and taking people out of the South, or even to Europe or we see just different abolitionists. And I'm definitely not going to say abolitionists of the time loved Black people. A lot of abolitionists still were separatist and believed that white people were better than Black people, but didn't believe in the systems of slavery. But you see these situations where it's like, so-and-so was enticed away by a white man or stolen away, and there's no reason why he would want to leave.”
It raises a question, Tashia says: What are the abolitionist’s aims? And is said person even that—an abolitionist?
“So it’s assumed he had to have been tricked by this white man who guided him away. And then it becomes, even within that, it's like, oh, is it a slave catcher? Maliciously being like, ‘I'm going to take you to freedom,’ but actually just selling somebody for money, or is it actually an abolitionist coming in and stealing people away?”
One of the ideas the research has most complicated, Tashia told me, is fugitivity itself.
“I think people who burn down plantations, they're not going to burn down the plantation and hang around. They're definitely going to run off. But maybe you find the same person who burnt down this plantation ... and that they’re just people who are overcoming being captured and brought across the Atlantic.
“It’s about the autonomy to make the decision to steal back their own life rather than be enslaved.”
Ultimately, the research opens more questions into the lives of subjects than answers. Take, for example, the case of Barbara the cook.
“How can I piece together the histories that I know of myself and that I can find in these archives to create narratives of what could have happened? It's like exactly how Barbara got away is never turned into a narrative. I could infer using these historical documents and trying to piece them together. And that's a really important thing for me too, is Black folk having agency to learn and tell their own stories, even when the archives so often leaves our stories out. And how can we do that with care?”
Worcester is Liminal
This story only happened because Tashia went to Ralph’s one night and met my friend Dan, who works there, and Dan happened to be listening to a podcast about runaway slaves and so they got to talking. Dan gave Tashia my email address and they emailed me. Small world stuff.
So of course like any good local reporter I had to ask Tashia what they thought of the city.
For one:
“I think Worcester has too many cops. It has an incredibly inflated police budget, and I see where they're policing.”
Amen.
More than that, Worcester has a certain vibe, which Tashia calls “liminal.”
“Worcester feels liminal because it has the potential to be a really good city that could support its community. But I don't know, maybe that money's going into the cameras or the police budget, but the money's going somewhere to where you don't really see a community. I don't really feel like a community aspect in Worcester, except maybe when I go to Ralph's. And so I guess I'll plug Ralph’s right there. If I didn't have Ralph's, I think I'd be pretty miserable.”
That’s a great slogan for Ralph’s, if you ask me. “If not for Ralph’s we’d be miserable.”
Most importantly, they say, they have good hot dogs.
“Two hot dogs and a bag of chips for $5 is unheard of,” they said.
Abrupt halt
After I was nearly done with this feature, I received an update that work at AAS would cease.
Apparently, project leadership at Cornell has decided to surreptitiously shelve the work after workers at the AAS collectively decided to withhold their research until certain demands were met. The workers expressed concerns about the ethics guiding the project and leadership at Cornell.
Tashia said they remain hopeful that the narrative contained in the bindings will have the opportunity to be explored and empower descendants.
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Maura Healey (R)
This week we got yet another example of the reality that is Maura Healey governing as a Republican. In a statement, she essentially eviscerated the state’s Right To Shelter law, prioritizing self-imposed budget constraints over the prospect of children being made to sleep outside. Per the Boston Globe:
Governor Maura Healey announced significant changes to the state’s emergency housing system Tuesday that sharply limit assistance to those who use temporary shelters and prioritizes needy Massachusetts families over migrants for longer-term placements.
As of Aug. 1, stays in so-called overflow shelters will be limited to just five days, and importantly, would require people to wait at least six months before they could qualify for placement at a longer-term facility. And for long-term shelter sites, which have long been at capacity, the state will expand its priority list to include families with veterans or who become unhoused by natural disasters.
Healey cites a lack of money here (it’ll cost $916 million to run the shelter system, she tells the Globe). On top of school districts like Worcester getting underfunded we can tack onto the list of disastrous after effects of Healey’s $1 billion tax cut for the rich. What we can spend money on, though: sending a delegation to the southern border “to make connections with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Joint Task Force-North, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and families to educate them about the lack of shelter availability in Massachusetts.”
How are the Democrats different again? Is it the mass deportations? That are actually in line with Healey’s “we’re full up here do not come” policy on immigration?
Activists have been quick to point out this shift is at direct odds with the state’s “Right to Shelter” law
Healey is quoted in the Globe denying this...
Healey was adamant the state is not abandoning the decades-old law, the only statewide right-to-shelter requirement in the country, but rather sending a message to those outside the state that “we do not have room here in Massachusetts.”
But I don’t see how. The law is very clear: The state will provide families with shelter. It does not say ‘the state will provide families with shelter for five days then they have to wait six months to reapply for shelter.’
Where are people supposed to go? Do we care?
Patriot Frump
Tracking down a tip I got from a little birdie, Katie and I made a pit stop on the way to the grocery store Monday to Sneakerama on Lake Ave, where, we were told, some fuckin loser put up a white supremacist banner.
We arrived and sure as shit there it was—smaller than I’d expected—an advertisement for a group called Patriot Front, stapled some 10 feet up on a telephone pole. It read “NO MORE FOREIGN WARS” with a “No” symbol slashing through a cascade of falling bombs. Downright hippy-coded, especially since a few feet under it there was a hand-painted sign reading “FAMILY” in pink with a heart. And you’d be forgiven for thinking it was hippy bullshit and not Nazi bullshit if you didn’t know what the PATRIOTFRONT.US advert at the bottom of the image stood for.
Underpinning this seemingly anti-war message is a platform of pure white supremacy. Patriot Front is an organization best thought of as a cousin of the Proud Boys, but somehow more sexless and trite. They’re the guys in the tan pants and the shields that cover their faces like anyone really gives a shit who they are.
Most recently, they did a march in Nashville that caught some headlines. One of their largest, there were about 100 members in attendance. They did the same in Boston in 2022 and caused a stir.
They preach a bunch of ethnostate hooey about the superiority of The White Man and His Claim To This Great Nation while looking like this.
Patriot Front is a Texas-based organization, but they have chapters all over the place, including New England.
As we can see here....
...the Massachusetts contingent, likely behind the sign I tore down, is dubbed Network 7 in the Patriot Front Telegram channel.
The ‘foreign war’ angle is new for these losers, as far as I can tell, and mildly worrying in that it’s not transparently Nazi-coded. A message many could ostensibly agree with. But best I can tell it stems from an antisemitic place. In the ‘secret Jewish cabal’ tradition.
The last time I carried out such a vigilante DPW act against Patriot Front, the banner was much larger, hanging over I-190 south as it connects with I-290, and it read “RECLAIM AMERICA.”
It’s a lot easier to figure out that that’s a Nazi slogan. Just ask “reclaim from whom?”
What I wrote about the group at the time still applies...
While it might seem scary to see a very large and very public display of neo-Nazi ideas in Worcester, it’s important to keep in mind that these guys are just a very small group of little crybaby nerds who do nothing but hang up banners and put stickers places and post on 4chan probably. While the ideology they ascribe to is extremely dangerous, they themselves are not and it’s important we as a community see them as the dorks that they are.
So what we have here is a handful of lonely, disaffected men who have unfortunately fallen into the grasp of an ideology that history has proven to be all too seductive to those who feel they’re owed something by a society that the society is not providing. But they do not in and of themselves represent any real threat. They’re nerds and we should treat them as such. It’s not in anyone’s best interest to be spreading any undue panic. While certainly a narrative that tracks in these nightmare times, we need to remember that without significant numbers these guys can’t really do anything.
So anyway we got it down with little trouble, tying paracord to a roll of duct tape and taking turns tossing it up around the sign until we got it wedged in just right between the plastic and the wood. With a quick yank it came down and we tossed it in a dumpster far enough away that no Dylann Roof wannabe could reasonably reclaim his property (and we can say his with near certainty. It’s always a him.)
The organization is similar but not the same as the one Zoom-bombing city council meetings. What I wrote about them stands for these guys:
This whole thing is the result of a couple nerds who’ve poisoned their own well enough they think they’re doing praxis for their neo-Nazi cause while being too cowardly to put their names and faces to it. The livestream was just voices. Pretty sad, but also interesting in a morose sort of way. They talk about it like they’re building a movement, which they’re not.
In a 1979 Lester Bangs essay titled “The White Noise Supremacists,” you can see the early roots of the internet-poisoning-turns-disaffected-dorks-to-Nazis phenomenon of the current moment. In the essay, Bangs tells Richard Hell about the singer of a punk group that he’d seen recently and how he hurled racial slurs at a group of Black kids:
“(Hell) dismissed it. ‘He thinks he’s being part of something by doing that—joining a club that’ll welcome him with open arms, trying to get accepted. It’s not real. Maybe I’m naive, but I think that’s what all racism is—not really directed at the target but designed to impress some other moron.”
I think it is naive to boil all racism down to trying to impress some moron, but in the special cases of these little Nazi fan clubs of the present and the shockjock punk acts of the 1980s, it certainly applies. These are insecure and maladjusted children seeking approval in the worst places. And they deserve to have their ass beaten for it and they deserve to feel even more lost and scared and at odds with the world. People in groups like Patriot Front deserve to die lonely and anonymous, and I do not believe there is a path for retribution. They are lost to themselves forever. Bangs himself puts it this way:
“You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized. Which is why it has to be monitored, made taboo and restrained, by society and the individual.”
These Patriot Front guys are the special cases of individuals that failed to do so. Embraced that little coiled clot of venom as opposed to restrained it. And once a person makes that choice there’s no olive branch left for ‘em.
Long story short, you see a Patriot Front banner or sign or sticker or leaflet out in the wild, just take it down and trash it. Like so.
Clash of civilizations
There’s a devastating line in a Washington Post story about Netanyahu’s visit to Congress yesterday. It goes like this...
“This is not a clash of civilizations. It's a clash between barbarism and civilization.
It's a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life," Netanyahu said to cheers and applause in the House chamber, as outside the Capitol throngs of police deployed pepper spray to keep protesters at a distance.
Well, it did go like that, until the Washington Post updated it:
…Netanyahu said to cheers and applause in the House chamber as protesters burned the prime minister in effigy a few blocks from the Capitol.
Pretty smarmy change to replace the police with the protesters as the chaos agent in this riff but I guess it’s still a ‘hell yeah’ that they burned an effigy of Netanyahu. Anyone with rhetoric like that—and anyone who greets it with raucous applause—deserves a little burning in effigy if you ask me.
The “clash of civilizations” line stems from a book of the same name by one Sam Huntington. For decades, the text has underpinned the general ideology of the Western war hawk. The premise is that in the post-Cold War era, wars will be fought between cultures, not states. Here Netanyahu takes the premise and ups the ante. He says the Palestinians are not a culture, but a people bereft of culture. Not redeemable —they do not “sanctify life.” It is language of the exterminator. Its ends are obvious, met by our political class with whoops and cheers.
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading, folks! Hope you liked it as much as I liked writing it.
The Worcester Business Journal did a big long look at the Polar Park financing, and found that they’re not dipping into the general fund to pay for the construction loans (yet) but heavily dipping into the contingency fund already (not good). This quote from Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson is very good:
“Even if the books balance, there is still a gigantic subsidy for this ballpark. Basically, all of the property tax from the new apartments across the street plus a bunch of other things are all being directed towards a stadium instead of towards schools or public safety or roads/infrastructure,” Matheson said in an email to WBJ. “All this budget is telling us is whether Worcester can pay for the stadium debt using the mechanisms that it put in place to pay for the facility. It was always fairly likely that this was the case. But it doesn't really tell us anything about whether the ballpark has been a good investment for the city.”
Thankfully Worcester is not one of the cities spotlighted in the recent blockbuster environmental story from ProPublica headlined “Poison in the Air.” The nut is that the EPA has these places called “sacrifice zones,” where people are allowed to continue living among environmental conditions that are known to make people sick and die. I held my breath when I opened up the data map to see if Worcester was one of these places. The sigh of relief is a cold comfort. 74 million Americans live in these sacrifice zones.
Great piece in Hell World about the the absolutely brutal police murder of Sonya Massey in Springfield, Illinois.
The white cop with the skull tattoos on his arm shot the unarmed Black woman in the face at point-blank range then told his partner not to bother trying to help her, she’s already gone.
Ok that’s all for today. I have to get packed. Talk to you next week!