Good Morning POU!
This week’s let’s revisit the story of Robert Reed Church. This is a very compelling biography that should definitely get a screenplay someday.
Inside a church made of laid stone and canopied by trees on a clearing in the woodlands of Arkansas, an enslaved woman named Emmeline was summoned to the front of the congregation to undergo a confirmation ceremony.
She was purportedly the first enslaved person to undergo the ritual in the state. The faces of the congregants at the Episcopal Church of Arkansas were of slave-owning families from the cotton plantations of the western part of the state. They watched with absorption as she marched to the front of the congregation. Not only would Emmeline confirm her faith, but she would also join slave-owning men and women as a member of the congregation and a sister in Christ.
Emmeline was a fair-skinned black woman described as “the most beautiful type of creole.” She was unmarried and had two children by two different men. That couldn’t be held against her, as her body had been sold and rented out at various points by the family who owned her, who claimed that “she lived the most Christian life of anyone we ever met.”
The confirmation ceremony consisted of a series of questions about accepting Christ and renouncing evil, which had to be answered affirmatively; it ended with prayers and the laying on of hands.
Emmeline’s ceremony was presided over by Bishop George Washington Freeman, a stoic man who dressed in gray vests and jackets with a preacher’s collar on his shirt. He put his hands on Emmeline’s head and shoulders and prayed over her as amens arose from the congregation.
With this sacrament, she hoped, a place would be prepared for her in Heaven. She was near the end of her life, and she was getting her affairs into order.
Emmeline was on borrowed time; at nearly forty years of age, she had surpassed the normal life expectancy for an enslaved person and had lived a long life for her era. In the 1850s, the average life span of enslaved African Americans was between twenty-two and thirty-six years. Between tetanus contracted from rusted farm equipment, food- and waterborne illnesses, sexually transmitted infections, disease-carrying mosquitoes, and hemorrhaging childbirths, enslaved people were considered lucky to reach their thirtieth year.
Emmeline had survived dozens of outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and yellow fever in the mosquito-infested backwater of the Mississippi delta. She had survived the doctorless births of two sons, but now she was waning, and as the year 1851 dawned on the plantation where she lived near the Arkansas-Tennessee state line, she could sense that she had entered the final stretch of her life. She had lived in one form or another of bondage since birth, and she hoped that before she joined her Lord of lords and her ancestors in the afterlife, she could secure the freedom of her children, Robert Reed Church and James Wilson.
Emmeline was born on a tobacco plantation outside Norfolk, Virginia. Her exact birth date was never recorded, but she was told she had been born about the year 1815. Her mother was an enslaved woman named Lucy. When Lucy was first sold as a girl on a slave auction block in Virginia, the slave seller claimed she was a tribal princess who had been taken from the island of Hispaniola. The rumor of royal blood would become family lore. Whether or not it was true, Lucy and her descendants would always believe they were from royalty despite their station as chattel.
For the first years of her life, Emmeline lived with her mother on a plantation in Lynchburg, Virginia, owned by a doctor named Phillip Burton. When she was a small girl, Dr. Burton gave her as a gift to his youngest daughter, Rosalie Virginia Burton. A few years later, the Burton family sold off her mother, Lucy, to a planter in Natchez, Mississippi, along with ninety-nine other slaves for more than $85,000 ($1.7 million).
Emmeline’s mother was sold away so early in life that Emmeline couldn’t remember much about her. Rosalie, her owner, was the closest thing she had to family for most of her life. Emmeline and Rosalie were “more the order of sisters than mistress and maid,” the family that owned her claimed. When Emmeline reached womanhood, Rosalie transferred the rights to her to a white businessman from Memphis who had taken an interest in her.
Captain Charles B. Church was a married man and spent most of his time away on the Mississippi River, where he commanded a fleet of steamships. Emmeline would serve as his concubine while continuing to reside with Rosalie. Captain Church would send for Emmeline when he wanted her.
In 1839, their trysts produced a son. Robert Reed Church, whom everyone called Bob, was born on June 18, 1839, on a cotton plantation outside Memphis, Tennessee. Captain Church fathered several white children with his wife, Mary Church, but Bob was his healthiest offspring. His only white children to live past infancy were Molly Church, a deaf-mute, and Charles Church Jr., who was sickly. A few years after Bob was born, Emmeline conceived another son, a boy, whom she named James Wilson. James was not Captain Church’s son, however, which was obvious from his blond hair and fair skin. Captain Church was a dark-featured, dark-haired white man.
In her final days, Emmeline underwent confirmation and brokered deals for her sons to be set free after she died. James, the younger of her boys, had blue eyes. He could pass for a white boy without much difficulty. He was described as being “as perfect a specimen of the Caucasian as could be found anywhere in the world.” Emmeline planned for James to live with Rosalie after she died; Rosalie promised to pass him off as one of her own kin.
Robert, on the other hand, had fair skin, narrow dark eyes, and wavy dark hair, and though he had “very little African blood,” he could not have passed for white as easily as his younger brother. Emmeline had to work out a different arrangement for him. One day, as her health was declining, Captain Church called on Emmeline. When they were in her quarters, she pleaded with him to free their son, Robert, upon her death and send him to a school for colored children in Cincinnati. Captain Church agreed, setting her mind at ease.
In 1851, Emmeline finally passed away on Rosalie’s plantation; in her last moments she hoped that her soul was bound for heaven and her sons would grow up free. Her death left her sons without a mother and crushed Rosalie. “I could never see as much sunshine in the after,” she said.
Not long after Emmeline was buried, a horse-drawn carriage arrived on Rosalie’s estate. The buggy carried Captain Charles Church, a thirty-nine-year-old white man of large stature. Church had tanned skin and dark hair that he wore parted at the side and tucked behind his ears. His face was round and boyish with small blue eyes and a downturned mouth. He wore expensive suits with ties knotted into a stubby bow around his collar.
As a boy growing up in Ohio, he had become fascinated with the work of Robert Fulton, the developer of the commercially successful steamboat, and taken to the river. He skipped his later years of schooling to work in the machine rooms of steamboats and taught himself engineering and sailing. In a few years, he worked his way up to the rank of captain. Now he was successful and wealthy and owned a steamboat line, multiple properties, and several slaves. His purpose in going to Rosalie’s estate was clear: he had come to the estate to take Robert away.
Robert was twelve years old when Captain Church came for him. He packed his things, said good-bye to his younger brother, James, and boarded his father’s carriage. They departed down a dirt road, rolling through acres of cotton fields, leaving the life he knew behind. Reflecting on Robert’s departure, Rosalie later lamented, “my love for your mother endeared her little ones to me. . . . I never intended to hold them in bondage . . . but your father promised your mother . . . he would put you in school and educate you.”
Captain Church had no intention of putting Bob in school; he told him he was taking him to Memphis to put him to work aboard his steamship.