C A T H E R I N E L E W I S
On the last day of May in 1938, a strange white woman showed up at Mrs. Rebecca Brown Hill’s door in Brinkley, Arkansas.
The woman introduced herself as Irene Robertson, and said she had come to interview Mrs. Hill about her memories of slavery. At seventy-eight years of age, Rebecca Brown Hill began to tell her story
Hill’s maternal grandmother, a woman named Harriet, was born in Baltimore about 1790. Harriet’s “master” was a man named John Abbott, and he was a cooper (barrel maker) by trade. Eventually, like so many enslaved women, Harriet was forced to carry her enslavers’ children. She had a boy first, and then, about 1819, a little girl whom she named Catherine.
But Harriet would not remain with her children long. John Abbott sold her away a few years after Catherine’s birth.
Then John Abbot married a white woman who soon gave him several white children. Still enslaved by their father, Catherine and her brother were forced to wait on their white half-siblings.
When Catherine and her brother were in their early teens, John Abbott decided to move his household to Washington,
D.C.. and it was there that Catherine suffered another severe loss.
One night, determined to escape slavery, her brother fled the Abbott household. He managed to get aboard a ship docked in the Potomac River, but before the vessel departed, he fell overboard and drowned. His body was discovered sometime afterwards by workers fishing for a woman’s trunk.
With her mother sold away and her brother dead, Catherine was extremely lonely. Desperate to spend time with people other than her enslavers, she sought out company wherever she could, including—of all places—the nearby “slave pen” of William H. Williams, one of Washington’s most notorious traders. Of course, Catherine never went inside the jail, but she didn’t have to. She could easily chat with people through the fence around the jail’s yard.
Even so, this was a dangerous place to visit. William H. Williams was not just a slave trader; he was also a kidnapper—of free and enslaved African Americans alike. Knowing this, Catherine always carried a basket on her arm so that she would appear to be on an errand for her enslavers, That way, Williams and his men would leave her alone, she figured. But she was wrong.
They snatched her straight off the street. And before she knew it, she was on a slave ship, the brig Uncas, headed for New Orleans. Catherine Lewis would never set foot in Maryland or Virginia again.
With fifty-five enslaved prisoners aboard, the brig Uncas set sale on November 19, 1839. Its voyage to New Orleans would last twenty-four days and twenty-four nights: time Catherine and her fellow prisoners mostly spent locked below deck in the ship’s damp and dark cargo hold.
Once the Uncas reached New Orleans, William H. Williams had a decision to make. On the one hand, he could try to sell Catherine just like he would everyone else on the ship. The trouble with that plan, however, was that buyers usually wanted to see some sort of proof of ownership before they’d fork over any money, and since Williams had stolen Catherine Lewis off the street, he had no papers for her at all. Of course, he would still be able to sell her, but only for a reduced price. This, Williams decided, would not do. So he came up with another plan.
Over the course of the voyage, Catherine Lewis had grown quite attached to one of her fellow captives, a thirty-year-old man named Jacob Brown: a fact—Williams realized—could be quite useful indeed.
Yes, a buyer with any sense at all would want to see Catherine’s papers, but folks were rarely so persnickety about temporary arrangements.
So, first things first, Williams struck up a deal hiring Jacob Brown out to a man from Alabama. Then, turning to Catherine, he said something like this: “I’m a kind man. What do you say I hire you out along with him?”
Catherine, of course, would have known that she was not Williams’s to sell. Asserting this fact, however, was unlikely to bring her anything but a beating, after which Williams would surely sell or hire her to some other white man, and without Jacob.
So it was that Catherine Lewis and Jacob Brown ended up in Chambers County, AL.
In Alabama, Catherine and Jacob weren’t free, but they were together. And so long as he knew he’d be held liable for any permanent harm he inflicted on someone else’s slaves, their master there was not as bad as most were. Of course—especially in the first few months—Catherine and Jacob talked about running, but before long, Catherine was with child. That baby was a boy, a son she and Jacob named Henry. A daughter, Hannah, followed soon after.
And that’s when William H. Williams showed up in Chambers County, looking to cash in on the “investments” he had stashed there two years prior. And this time, Williams wasn’t interested in making any temporary arrangements. He was determined to sell the whole family. With papers for Jacob and the two children on hand, he doubted anyone would make a fuss about his having “misplaced” Catherine’s.
—unless, that is, Catherine made a fuss herself. That was possible, Williams figured, but could be avoided, because—just like before—he had a plan. And so, yet again, Williams asked Catherine a question. It went something like this:
"You wanna be sold with your husband and these here two children? Or are you gonna start some kind of trouble?”
As she and Irene Robertson settled in at her kitchen table in May of 1938, Rebecca Brown Hill offered the first line of what would be quite a long story:
“I was born October 18, 1859 in northeast Mississippi.”
BASED ON ORIGINAL RESEARCH BY JENNIE K. WILLIAMS, PH.D.