Glossary

Carding 

The combing of raw wool or cotton between a pair of wire-toothed paddles, drawing the tangled fibers into a soft, aligned mass ready for spinning. It was slow, ordinary handwork, done at odd hours by women in kitchens and cabins across the country, and a carding comb was the sort of implement that lasted a lifetime and outlived its use. A pair kept on a nail long after the last wool in the house was gone would be a keepsake rather than a tool. 

Coffle 

A line of enslaved people chained or roped together and driven overland for sale, most often from the older seaboard states toward the cotton and sugar country of the Deep South. Coffles moved on ordinary public roads, in daylight, past farms and taverns and children at play; they were among the most common sights of the domestic slave trade and among the least remarked upon in the records of the people who passed them. 

Cooper 

A maker of barrels, casks, hogsheads, and buckets—a skilled trade, and an essential one in a region whose crops and naval stores all travelled in wooden vessels. Tobacco, tar, pitch, and turpentine could not reach a ship without a cooper’s work, and coopering was among the trades enslaved men were most often trained to, being too valuable to leave to hired labour. 

Deadfall 

Fallen timber—an accumulation of dead trees, limbs, and debris on the forest floor, often piled or interlocked into a tangled mass that is difficult to cross. A large trunk down among the leaf litter makes a natural bench, dry and off the ground, and deadfalls were the ordinary furniture of a day spent in the woods. 

Deal table 

A plain table made of deal, an old British term for softwood planks, usually pine or fir. The word comes from the Middle Dutch/Low German dele, meaning “plank.” A deal table was cheap, unvarnished, and utilitarian, the kind found in kitchens, servants’ quarters, cottages, workshops, and poor households. Deal tables were often scrubbed white with sand or soap instead of being polished. 

Hoecake, pone 

Plain breads of cornmeal, water, and salt—the daily bread of the plantation South, cooked on a griddle, in a skillet, on a hoe blade held over the coals, or buried directly in the ashes of the hearth. Cold pone and cold hoecake, eaten out of hand with whatever meat was to be had, were what a person carried into the fields or the woods. 

Hogshead 

A hogshead is a large cask (barrel) used to store or transport liquid products like wine, ale, or cider. In the U.S., it’s a unit equal to 63 gallons. 

Hurdle 

A portable panel of fencing—a rectangular frame of interwoven or nailed wooden slats, light enough for one or two men to carry—used to make temporary pens and folds for livestock, to close a gap, or to yard animals for a night. Hurdles took the constant leaning and shoving of stock and were forever in want of mending, which made the repair of a broken one a byword for tedious work. 

Lightwood 

Often pronounced, and sometimes written, light’ood or lighterd; also called fat lighter and fatwood. Resin-saturated pine, prized above all from the heartwood and stumps of the longleaf pine, whose sap concentrates in the wood as the tree ages or after it is cut. Split fine, it catches from a single spark and burns hot and smoky, and it was the standard fire-starter of the Southern hearth. Lightwood is the oldest and most widespread of these terms and the one that dominated in the Carolinas, where longleaf pine and the naval-stores trade—tar, pitch, turpentine, and rosin—shaped the whole economy of the coastal plain. Old stumps were grubbed out of the ground for it years after the tree itself was gone. 

Manumission 

The formal legal act by which an owner freed an enslaved person, effected by deed or by will and recorded with the court. The asymmetry is worth noting: a person could be made property at birth by the silent operation of law, requiring no document whatever, but could be made free only by an instrument drawn, signed, witnessed, and filed. By the 1830s several Southern states, North Carolina among them, had made manumission deliberately difficult—requiring court or legislative approval, the posting of a bond, and in some cases the freed person’s departure from the state. 

Parley 

Shorthand for a volume by “Peter Parley,” the pen name of the American writer and publisher Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793–1860). Beginning in the 1820s, Goodrich produced scores of illustrated children’s books on history, geography, and natural science, narrated in the voice of a genial old traveller who tells young readers about the world. They were among the most widely used schoolroom texts in America through the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, and were extensively pirated and imitated abroad. A tutor in a Carolina household would have kept one at hand as a matter of course. 

Partus sequitur ventrem 

Latin: “the offspring follows the belly.” The legal doctrine, codified in Virginia in 1662 and adopted throughout the slaveholding colonies and states, that a child’s condition follows the mother’s rather than the father’s. Its practical effect was that a child born to an enslaved woman became the property of her owner at birth, automatically and without any act of purchase, gift, or record. It also meant that a white man who fathered a child upon an enslaved woman thereby owned his own child. The rule reversed the ordinary common-law descent through the father, and it did so for reasons no one troubled to disguise. 

Patroller 

A member of a slave patrol—a body of white men, usually drawn by rotation from the local militia rolls, empowered to ride the roads at night, stop any Black person abroad, demand a pass, search the quarters, and administer summary whippings. Service was often compulsory and generally unpopular among the men obliged to perform it, which did nothing to soften its exercise. Patrollers were the mechanism by which the written pass became the difference between an errand and a crime. 

Pawpaw 

Asimina triloba, the largest edible fruit native to North America, and the only temperate member of a family that is otherwise tropical. Pawpaws grow as small understory trees, spreading by root suckers into dense patches in bottomland and along creek banks—the “pawpaw bottoms”—where they fruit in the deep shade of larger timber in late summer and early fall. The fruit is green and unremarkable to look at, ripening soft to the thumb, with a custardy flesh and large brown seeds. It bruises easily, ferments within days of ripening, and cannot be shipped or stored, which is why a fruit once gathered by the basketful across the whole of the eastern woodland never became a crop and is now largely unknown to the people who live  where it grows. Pawpaws were a common late-summer food for anyone with the freedom to go into the woods and get them. 

Quarter, the quarters 

The cabins housing the enslaved people of a plantation, and by extension the community that lived in them—set apart from the main house, usually out of its sight, and constituting a world with its own kinship, memory, authority, and speech, largely opaque to the family whose property its inhabitants were. 

Settle 

A long wooden bench with a high solid back and, commonly, arms at either end; the seat frequently hinged to open on a storage box beneath. A very old form of furniture, found in kitchens, farmhouses, inns, and taverns from the medieval period into the nineteenth century. The high back was practical rather than ornamental—set near a hearth it blocked the draught and threw the fire’s heat forward—which made the settle the warmest seat in the room and, as a rule, the one people gathered on. 

Topping 

The cutting away of the flowering head of a tobacco plant so that its strength goes into the leaf rather than into seed. It was done by hand, plant by plant, down rows in high summer heat, and it was followed by suckering—the pinching out of the shoots that came afterward. A hand who topped badly was visible to everyone in the row. 

Trap 

A light two-wheeled carriage drawn by a single horse, seating two or four, and driven as often as not by its owner. The word is thought to come from “rattletrap.” A trap was the vehicle of a man of means going a short distance on ordinary business—comfortable, unceremonious, and nothing like the coach or barouche in which one arrived to make an impression. 

Trunk 

Also called a “rice trunk” is a wooden sluice set into the bank of a rice field, opened and closed to flood the field from the river or drain it back.