Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor in Afro-American Studies at Smith College and the author of When and Where I Enter and In Search of Sisterhood.

Ida: A Sword Among Lions

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

Holly Springs

I often compare [my mother's] work in training her children to that of other women who had not her handicaps.
—Ida B. Wells

There was no need to kill here [Holly Springs], only to deprive?.?.?.?
—Hodding Carter

Ida Wells remembered being told as a child that her mother, Elizabeth, called Liza or Lizzie by friends, was born somewhere in Virginia, was one of ten children, and that her father was part Native American and her grandfather a "full-blooded" one. The only other detail she recalled about her mother's early life was that Lizzie was taken from her family when quite young and, with two of her sisters, was sold by a slave trader into Mississippi, and sold a second time before she was purchased by Spires Boling, an architect and contractor in Holly Springs. One of her mother's masters had "seared her flesh and her mind with torturous beatings," and by contrast Boling, who never used corporal punishment against her, was the "kindest" master of all. But Ida did not remember the name of the Virginia family to whom Lizzie "belonged" or the county in which she was born.¹

However, circumstantial evidence suggests that Lizzie Wells was born to Annie Arrington and George Washington about 1844 on a plantation owned by William Arrington in Appomattox County, Virginia.² Lizzie must have been sold when she was seven or eight years old, the average age in most slaveholding states when a child's market value was greater without her mother than with her. Compounding the crime, but softening the blow of separation, the sale also included two of her sisters—Martha, two years younger, and Isabelle or Belle, for whom Ida was named, two years older. The sale was probably handled by George D. Davis and his brother John, merchants reputed to offer the highest prices for slaves in the area, and who had had previous dealings with the extended Arrington family. The two men customarily traveled from estate to estate, picking one, two, or three slaves from each homestead until they gathered a hundred or more to sell on the market.³

The Davis brothers purchased most of their slaves during the summer and fall, when they could get them at lower prices and "trim, shave, wash," and "fatten" them until they looked "sleek" and could be sold at a profit. The Arringtons were closest to the Lynchburg slave mart, about twenty miles away, which was then beginning to rival Richmond and Petersburg in its volume of sales. At the height of the buying season, children who had been bought from their owners—like Lizzie, Martha, and Belle—could be seen traveling two by two, their wrists bound by a rope, their pace hastened by an enforcer's whip.⁴

When such children reached Lynchburg, they were taken to a brick building on First and Lynch Street, where slaves were secured before they were sold. The prepubescence of young girls saved them from being intimately scrutinized by potential buyers who routinely examined buttocks and considered breasts. The health of children, by contrast, was determined by making them run in circles, or jump up and down, or skip along in measured distances.⁵

By October of 1858, Lizzie, about thirteen or fourteen, was among the nine slaves owned by Spires Boling; her sisters, Belle and Martha, were settled nearby, in Marshall and DeSoto counties, respectively.⁶

Now a boling, Lizzie's primary responsibility was cooking for the middle-aged contractor; his pregnant wife, Nancy; and the household, which consisted of an older female relative and seven children between the ages of one and eighteen.⁷ Lizzie's development into an excellent cook and the nonviolent treatment at the hands of her owner were not atypical of the fourteen hundred slaves in Holly Springs. Although there were laws that prohibited blacks from assembling, and one published account by a minister noted the death of several women slaves by whipping, the political economy of the town demanded labor that required more skill than brawn; and it encouraged paternalism rather than violence.⁸

The white population of Holly Springs had begun to settle in earnest there in 1837, the year Holly Springs was incorporated and the original Chickasaw Indian inhabitants had been removed to the Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). Under the mounting pressure of President Andrew Jackson's land-hungry administration, the Chickasaws signed the Treaty of Pontotoc in 1832, which extinguished their title to all of the lands east of the Mississippi, comprising the entire northern portion of the state. Of the twelve Mississippi counties jigsawed out of the territory, Marshall County, in the northwestern part of the state and named after the recently deceased Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, was the largest and the richest. In a mere twenty years, it would yield more cotton per square acre than any similar subdivision in the world. Holly Springs—named after a large, thirty-foot-wide, ten-foot-deep spring in a hollow that watered a thick grove of holly trees—became Marshall's county seat and administrative center. Soon afterward, the town was embroiled in feverish land speculation and sales and also became the site of northern Mississippi's first bank.⁹

As such, Holly Springs attracted "Episcopalians, Virginians and Whigs"—deserting the thinning soil and accumulating debts of the older cotton states—who brought their "ruffled shirts," "libraries," and "slaves" with them, as one historian noted.¹⁰ The bustling county seat also attracted bankers, retail merchants, land speculators, those in the building trades, and a bevy of lawyers as the town, already cleared of growth by the Chickasaws to facilitate its use as a hunting ground, grew at a dizzying pace. By 1845, the nearly thirty-five hundred residents of Holly Springs had established St. Thomas Hall, a boy's educational academy, and the six-year-old Holly Springs Collegiate Institute for young women was prepared to award Mistress of Polite Literature degrees and include subjects such as algebra, physics, and natural philosophy. "Our object is to impart a sound, substantial, liberal education," announced its president . . .