Charles D. Higgins’s notebooks

Charles D. Higgins’s notebooks are the supposed record of Henry Shackleford’s life and the material frame through which his first-person account reaches readers. Discovered in a fireproof box beneath Higgins’s church chair after a church fire, the charred notebooks promise a hidden history while leaving its authenticity open to scrutiny. Their importance lies both in what they claim to preserve and in the unstable, comic testimony through which that past is told.

Discovery and Material Context

The notebooks came to public attention after the First United Negro Baptist Church of the Abyssinia at Fourth and Bainbridge Streets was destroyed by fire. Fire officials attributed the blaze to a faulty gas heater; nobody was injured. Among the scorched remains were notebooks belonging to the late deacon Charles D. Higgins, whose papers attracted national academic interest.

The account was stored in a metal fireproof box under the floorboards of Higgins’s chair behind the pulpit. Higgins had occupied that chair faithfully for more than forty-three years. Alongside the notebooks lay an envelope containing twelve Confederate dollars, a rare feather from an ivory-billed woodpecker, and a note from Higgins’s late wife. The fire had made the archive newly visible: objects kept out of sight became evidence to be examined, and the notebooks’ damaged condition became part of their public story.

The Claimed Record

The neatly bound notebooks say Higgins gathered the facts of Henry Shackleford’s life through interviews in 1942. Higgins’s account of their acquaintance places them together as Sunday school teachers at First United in the early 1940s. He further records that Shackleford was later expelled from the church in 1947, though his explanation is presented in Higgins’s own dismissive language rather than as independent verification.

That claimed chain of transmission gives the notebooks the form of testimony, but not the certainty of a transparent record. The account passes from Shackleford’s remembered experience through interviews attributed to Higgins and then through notebooks discovered decades later. The evidence establishes what the notebooks claim about their making; it does not independently settle the truth of every detail they contain.

What the Testimony Preserves

The narrative voices material experience that formal historical accounts can leave at the margins. Henry describes concealing men’s clothes and a few saved pennies while considering how to begin again in Canada. Elsewhere, he recalls the difficulty of presenting himself as a man, his dependence on people who cared for him, and the pressure of being judged through race and gender. These passages make the notebooks’ purported life-history less a detached chronology than a record of vulnerability, concealment, and self-understanding.

The testimony also places private choices beside public abolitionist activity. Henry describes John Brown’s effort to raise money before returning west, and the strain of long fundraising meetings where extended prayers could cause listeners to leave before the collection was passed. Such details complicate heroic public narratives: political purpose appears alongside practical limits, fatigue, and the costs of persuading an audience.

Archive, Voice, and Historical Memory

Henry’s narration is deliberately self-undermining. He admits to lying when challenged, and he describes wanting to become a man while also fearing hunger, danger, and the loss of care. His account of literacy is similarly concrete: he says he can read and is seeking paid work teaching someone else. These moments give the notebooks a witness’s particularity without making the narrator a neutral or fully reliable recorder.

The notebooks also contest the authority of later written accounts. Henry remarks that many versions circulate of the final meeting between John Brown and Frederick Douglass, while insisting that only four adult men were present and that Douglass was the sole survivor able to recount it. His skepticism draws attention to the gap between an event and the stories subsequently written about it. In the frame narrative, the congregation plans to submit Higgins’s account to a Negro history expert for verification and later sell the notebooks for publication, using the proceeds to buy a new church van. The archive is therefore caught between historical inquiry and practical community need: it is at once a disputed record, a proposed publication, and a resource for the church that preserved it.