In 1886, Charles Dudley Warner, a Massachusetts-born writer, traveled to Nashville, Tennessee to learn about the Southern way of life. Soon after arriving, Warner received an invitation from William Giles Harding and William Hicks Jackson to visit their home, Belle Meade, one of the most profitable and famous plantations in Tennessee. Known for its exquisite displays of Southern hospitality, Warner knew of nowhere better to research the South’s customs and people. In particular, it seemed like the best place to catch a glimpse of the South’s legendary “mammies.”
After Warner asked to see a “real Southern Mammy,” Jackson summoned Susanna McGavock Carter. When the small, gray-haired, light-skinned Black woman entered the room, Warner stared at her, captivated. He asked Carter what she thought about freedom, and, according to his account, she replied: “The hardest days I have known have been in these years of freedom. I never knew what work was nor what anxiety was when I had old master to provide for me and mine.” Later, when asked about his visit to the South, Warner exclaimed: “the colored woman Susanna I met at General Harding’s was the most remarkable thing I saw in the South.” 1
I was immediately skeptical of Carter’s response in light of the larger contexts of a post-slavery and post-Reconstruction South where Black people constantly deployed deference as a shield against racial violence. My question then became, how do we read these sources and restore their voices? In my own research, I’ve attempted to flesh out Susanna McGavock Carter’s life through an intersectional and interactive methodology: questioning, analyzing, and reinterpreting the sources in the archive and stories echoed at places like Belle Meade. I’ve asked myself: what were the thoughts running through her head when Warner asked her about freedom? How did she conceptualize freedom? How did she experience both slavery and freedom as an enslaved and eventually working-class Black woman? Looking past and through what her owners, employers, and other white people have written and said about her, what is Susanna McGavock Carter trying to tell me?