Faith Plantation records

Faith Plantation records are the surviving documentary record of the plantation’s enslaved population and later apprentices. Their arrival in an abolitionist archive allows Washington Black to recover facts about the institution and his own family, but the records’ lists and classifications also expose how official documentation can preserve lives while rendering them impersonal.

Contents and Custody

After the plantation was sold, its records were deposited with an organization engaged in preserving documents and continuing the struggle against slavery. The organization was more than a repository: its staff described ongoing anti-slavery work even after emancipation in the British West Indies, and identified slavery in America as an enduring concern. Christopher Wilde had visited about two years earlier to deliver Faith’s records and help organize them; the archive’s staff knew that he had supported the organization, though they could not explain his later mission or destination.

Washington and Tanna Goff were given access to a room containing a large wooden box of bound records. The surviving material included a scrapbook of old newspaper notices and plantation-related items, as well as books whose pages had become fragile with age. For Washington, the contrast was stark: the world of his childhood had been gathered into a single crate, and the people whose lives it recorded now appeared as entries in books. The archive offered evidence, but handling that evidence made the distance between a preserved document and a lived life impossible to ignore.

Records of Pursuit and Forced Labor

The scrapbook included notices about enslaved people who had been lost or offered for sale, alongside advertisements for social events on neighboring plantations. Among them Washington recognized the reward notice that he and Christopher Wilde had previously seen in Virginia. It named him as George Washington Black, described him as a fugitive enslaved boy, and offered a thousand pounds for his capture, dead or alive. The notice was issued by John Francis Willard, acting for Erasmus Wilde. In the archive, a document once used to mobilize a fugitive’s capture became evidence of the legal and social machinery that treated Washington as property.

Another volume recorded people who remained at Faith after emancipation under the apprenticeship system. Its columns listed their names and death dates. Washington searched for Big Kit under both the name she had been born with, Nawi, and the name assigned to her after her arrival in the West Indies. He eventually found her death date. The plainness of the entry—life reduced to a name and a mark in a register—intensified his grief rather than resolving it. The record confirmed that Kit had died, but could not contain the character of her life or the relationship Washington had only gradually come to understand.

The records also sat against Washington’s knowledge of how plantation authority had operated. After a new master took over Faith, new overseers were brought in and severe punishments followed; a man who tried to escape was killed, and the enslaved people were made to pass by his remains and branded again. Later, the master refused to release fifteen enslaved workers for another purpose, arguing that he could not lose their labor in the fields. Read alongside such events, the volumes are not neutral lists: their categories belong to a system that counted people according to labor, ownership, and control.

Big Kit and the Family Revelation

A second book contained a carefully kept log in the hand of Richard Black, Washington’s first master and Christopher Wilde’s uncle. On its marked page, Washington found the names Catherine MacCauley and Kit. The entry disclosed what had been hidden from him: Big Kit was his mother. The revelation came not through a spoken confession but through a plantation record, written in the hand of the man who had once held power over their lives.

That discovery transformed Washington’s memories of Kit. She had at first ignored him, then fiercely protected him when he appeared in her hut. Her care could be severe as well as devoted: she cursed and struck him, held him with a force that frightened him, and answered his questions about his origins with teasing, contradictory stories. She could call him foolish and brilliant in the same breath. The record supplied the relationship’s fact, while memory supplied its difficult texture; neither could replace the other.

The discovery also brought Washington back to the history that had preceded his own childhood. He imagined the violence Kit had endured before and during her forced passage to Barbados, and the deaths and suffering associated with that crossing. He recalled that she had been left behind in the cane fields when he went with Christopher Wilde, and that time away had caused him to forget the sound of her voice and the details of her face. These memories arose as he read, and Tanna’s hand on his shoulder made him recognize that he was crying. The archive therefore preserved information, but its encounter with Washington did not remain an intellectual exercise: it reopened grief over a mother he had lost before he understood who she was.

Evidence, Memory, and Significance

Washington’s encounter with the records belongs to a larger tension between documentary evidence and lived memory. His account begins by restarting itself for the record and acknowledging uncertainty about his own birth: he had been told he was born in Barbados in 1818, but had also heard a different account placing his birth aboard an illicit vessel during the Atlantic crossing in 1817. The records at Faith offer firmer evidence about names, labor, death, and ownership, yet they cannot settle every question of origin or recover the full lives behind their entries.

Christopher Wilde’s abolitionist work gives the archive a further purpose. He had compiled a catalogue of cruelties on the plantation, explaining that he was gathering observations for people seeking an end to slavery and intending that reports reach an influential parliamentary contact. Faith’s records and such testimony made abuses available to readers beyond the plantation. But Washington’s reaction to Kit’s entry demonstrates the limits of preservation: a date in a ledger can establish a death, and a name in a master’s hand can disclose kinship, but neither can restore the person to the world or make the injustice of her life ordinary.

The books thus function at once as evidence, administrative instruments, and an imperfect memorial. They disclose how enslavement and post-emancipation apprenticeship were documented, help expose a fugitive-capture regime, and reveal the relationship between Washington and Big Kit. Their power lies in what they can prove; their insufficiency lies in the gulf between a recorded name and the human life that the record cannot hold.