Books: Slave & Slaveholder

WILLIAM JOHNSON’S NATCHEZ (812 pp.)—Louisiana State University ($10).

In ante-bellum Natchez there was a law against selling liquor to Negroes, but in spite of it the slave Steven was always getting drunk. When he drank, he tried to escape. When he was caught, he was flogged. On Aug. 10, 1840, his master’s diary shows that he was beaten twice: “After he had been Brot home, [I] Hand Cuffed him and Floged Him. In the first place I Knocked him Down at the Building—he then ran away, but was soon Brought Back again . . . I gave Him Late in the afternoon a tolerable severe whiping.” Master William Johnson thought he knew how to handle slaves: he had once been a slave himself.

Set free at eleven by the same master who owned and freed his mother, Johnson became an apprentice barber. At 21, he opened a shop of his own in Natchez and prospered. When he married, in 1835, he was a solid man of property, owner of four slaves and the most prosperous barbershop in town. That same year, he began to keep a shrewd and candid diary; when he died in 1851, shot in a boundary dispute by a half-breed, the diary filled 2,000 pages. Rediscovered almost 90 years later in the attic of his old house, William Johnson’s Natchez is one of those authentic windfalls that period scholars festoon with footnotes, and plain readers enjoy as offbeat browsing.

“Such Things Ocur.” Natchez tempers ran high in Johnson’s day. He reports scores of brawls fought with every conceivable hand weapon from bowie knives to whips. Throughout the diary, doctors and businessmen have at each other with such fury that Johnson seems to be stooping to trivia when he records that “Old man Guinea John” stabbed a foe “Just below the navle, Tis supposed that the nife has Cut a Gut.”

Johnson accepted brawling as routine, but he was by no means tolerant of other kinds of misconduct. Before his marriage, he carefully entered in his account books 50¢ expenditures for “Sensuality” and “Sensual Pleasure”; afterward, such entries stop. As a respectable father (ten children), he was roused by the rascalities of a French wencher, hoped that “Some Gentleman would only Cetch the Low minded Dog and Cow hyde him well.” Sadly he reports: “A Mr. — was caught in bed with Mr. Parkers old Big Black woman Buster and a Mr. — was Caught in bed with old Lucy Brustie, Hard times indeed, when Such things Ocur.”

As a barber, Johnson picked up plenty of gossip right in his shop, but he also got around town. He owned a farm, did a steady business as money lender, ran a thriving bathhouse and hired out slaves. Next to business, his passion was “manly sport.” He seems to have spent as much time at the busy Natchez race track as he did in his shop, bet regularly, and finally owned his own race horses. Marksmanship and hunting ran racing a close second. Unfortunately, Johnson would shoot anything that moved, from alligators to robins. A typical day’s bag: “2 Squirrells, 1 white Crane, 4 or 5 Aligators, 2 tolerable Large Snakes and 1 very Large one, water Mockersins, 1 frog.”

Henry Clay & Mrs. Morris. There were still other sides to Johnson. He subscribed to newspapers and magazines (including the New York Mirror), learned to play the guitar and followed local and national politics. At 12½¢ a shave, 25¢ a haircut, his shop—for white men only—sometimes took in $30 a day, and he lived accordingly. In his house were piano, guitar, flute and violins. He left a library of several hundred volumes, including French and Spanish grammars and Shakespeare. But for William Johnson, free man of color who hired white help on his farm and had many white well-wishers, there was still a line which he could never cross. Even when he decided to hear a famous visiting Methodist preacher, he had to listen from outside the church.

Johnson’s diary is fragmentary and generally superficial. What makes it good skimming is its colloquial freshness and directness. Johnson never wrote like a man who expected that Louisiana State University would one day publish his literary remains. He recorded the visits to Natchez of Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, but with true neighborly interest and relief he also noted that “Mrs Mary Morris has a fine Daughter Last night. She got married 24th May 1849. Thus it is 9 months and 5 days.”