Delia Garlic

[This is an edited excerpt of Dr. Jennie K. Williams's forthcoming book, Oceans of Kinfolk: the Coastwise Traffic of Enslaved Persons to New Orleans, 1820-1860. Please do not cite or circulate without permission.]

Delia Garlic, the youngest of thirteen children in her family, was born into an enslaved family in Powhatan, Virginia, a small town along the eastern edge of the Virginia Piedmont.

In colonial times, the Piedmont as well as the region immediately to its east, Tidewater, were mostly tobacco country. By the time of Garlic’s birth-likely in the mid-1830's-however, cash crops were no longer the most valuable “export” of either region; people were. In fact, while Garlic grew up just thirty miles away, Richmond reigned as the upper south’s leading market for buying and selling human beings: a commerce that persisted until the Civil War. By then, however, Delia Garlic was long gone from Virginia.

By her own account, Garlic was roughly a century old in the summer of 1937, when a white woman named Margaret Fowler showed up at her door at 43 Stone Street in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Federal Works Progress Administration had hired Fowler to conduct interviews of formerly enslaved individuals, and she hoped Garlic would be her first interviewee. However, whether or not Fowler knew it, there were several reasons Garlic might have refused Fowler’s request. The first was the subject of the intended interview: life in slavery. Many formerly enslaved people found it too painful to talk about their lives before the Civil War. And then there was the matter of Margaret Fowler herself. Unlike Garlic, Fowler was native to Alabama; she grew up just two hours or so from Garlic’s home in Montgomery. Whatever else Margaret Fowler may or may not have been, she was also a white woman from and in the South. At approximately 100 years of age, Delia Garlic had surely learned that it was often dangerous to talk about much of anything—but especially slavery— with anyone matching Margaret Fowler’s description.

Maybe, however, there was something about Margaret Fowler that inspired trust. Or, maybe, and perhaps more likely, having survived slavery, the terror of Reconstruction, and several decades of Jim Crow, Delia Garlic was simply done mincing her words around white people. Either way, Garlic agreed to be interviewed, and the resulting transcript makes one thing clear: Delia Garlic said what she meant and meant what she said.

So unflinching was Garlic’s account of life in slavery that Margaret Fowler ultimately chose to preface the transcript she typed up of Garlic’s words with a warning to readers (whom she must have assumed would look and think like her): “Unlike many of the old Negroes of the South, [Garlic] has no good words for slavery days or the old masters.” Then she recorded the first line of Delia Garlic’s testimony: 

“Dem days was hell.”

Having stated her case, Garlic laid out the evidence. She pointed first and foremost to the separation of African American families by interregional human traffickers. “Babies was snatched from dere mother’s breas’ an’ sold to speculators,” she said. “Chilluns was separated from sisters an’ brothers an’ never saw each other ag’in.” In these first few lines, Garlic spoke as a witness. Later on, however, she revealed that she was also speaking from experience. Recalling the night she had been sold in Richmond, Garlic described the last moment she shared with her mother:

“I has thought many times through all dese years how mammy looked dat night. She pressed my han’ in bofe of hers an’ said” ‘Be good an’ trus’ in de Lawd.”

These were the only memories Garlic shared of her youth in Virginia. The remainder of her testimony described her life in the Deep South, including enslavement in Louisiana as well as Georgia. Throughout the interview, Garlic maintained her characteristic frankness. Of the plantations where she was enslaved, she said: “Us didn't know nothin' ‘cept to work.” On whether or not she anticipated slavery’s end, she said, “Us jest prayed fer strength to endure it to de end,” and “we didn't 'spect nothing but to stay in bondage til we died.” And when asked if her enslavers fought for the Confederacy, she said, "Yas'm, Massa Garlic had two boys in de war. When dey went off de Massa an' missis cried, but it made us glad to see dem cry. Dey made us cry so much.” In sum, Fowler was correct in her impression that Garlic had nothing good to say about slavery.

This, however, was not a point Fowler conceded easily. In fact, judging by many of the questions she asked of Garlic, Fowler seems to have anticipated that the interview would confirm what she already believed to be true: slavery wasn’t actually all that bad! In fact, Fowler seems to have believed, most “ex-slaves” probably missed the old days! This is by no means what Delia Garlic communicated, and the resulting contrast, between what Garlic knew from lived experience and what Fowler believed, made for an exchange that sometimes bordered on the absurd.

For example, when Garlic shared that she had to eat her breakfast at 3:00 a.m. during slavery, Fowler just wanted to know whether or not those breakfasts included coffee. Likewise, when Garlic emphasized the hopelessness she felt in slavery (“Us never dreamed dat freedom would come”), Fowler replied by inquiring whether there were ever any “dances or parties” on the plantation.

Faced with questions like these, Garlic somehow maintained her composure. She answered every single question, and generally did so without so much as a hint of disdain for Fowler’s inanity. That said, Fowler did ask one question that clearly tested Delia Garlic’s patience.

This question came just after Garlic finished recounting the breaking up of enslaved families in Virginia: a description which evidently left Fowler wondering how enslaved people responded to being bought and sold. Or, at least, that must have been what Fowler wondered, since in response, she asked—of all things—whether or not enslaved people cried when they were sold.

Nearly two hundred years later, the fury of Garlic’s response is still palpable:

“Course dey cry,” she said, “you think dey not cry when dey was sold lak cattle? I could tell you 'bout it all day, but even den you could-n't guess de awfulness of it.”

Reading Garlic’s words today, one wonders how much of the elderly woman’s fury was inspired by Margaret Fowler alone and how much was inspired, also, by the fact that there were, and are, millions of Margaret Fowlers: millions of white people, that is, who refuse to grapple with or even acknowledge the price of their forebears' wealth and power, which is to say: the price of their wealth and power. That price, of course, was a recurrent tsunami of grief, trauma, and violence inflicted on one African American generation after another.

For Delia Garlic, surely it was one thing to have inherited, like Margaret Fowler had, such a bloody legacy, but it was quite another to stand there, on Garlic’s front porch, asking whether or not black folks had even felt the pain white people inflicted on them.