Letters from a Planter's Daughter: Understanding Freedom and ...

173
Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
in her most vulnerable and dependent state that her guardians recognized
that she was an independent adult, able to make her own choices in life.
Susanna did not escape Wesley’s household—nor could she escape
the uncertainty of her life as a mixed-race planter’s daughter by “passing”
across the color line. Knowing this, interpreting what freedom meant for a
woman such as Susanna grows more difficult—is freedom so narrowly defined
as to be emancipation from legal bondage, and nothing more? What
does it mean for a person to be “free” when class and racial status keep
her in a position of degradation? 121 Attempting to answer these questions
requires self-conscious analysis about how we use the archive to read a
life.
*
I cannot know what Susanna Townsend would think of someone who
never saw, spoke with, or knew her attempting to draw lessons and “meaning”
from her life. Perhaps she would be insulted—as though it were not
meaning enough that she lived it. If there is a grand theme to draw from
a narrative of her experiences, it comes too late for Susanna to benefit.
Still, the tragedy sits too heavy and we long for redemption—for us, or
her, or both. 122 Is it useful, then, to note that Susanna was back in school
when she died? That her “last” letter and her “last” hope were her last only
by chance before she succumbed to a long-term illness? That she did not
die because a purposeful narrative arc had closed, Susanna having run
out of hopes for an independent life? In fiction, Susanna’s choices would
symbolize something poignant and easily pinpointed. In history, Susanna
exercised her freedom while she lived because she lived, and perhaps the
lesson to draw from that is a methodological one—that the greater purpose
of telling stories such as Susanna’s may be nothing more than telling
them, reasserting through them the existence of a woman named Susanna
Townsend despite the problems of the archive.
A reconstruction and examination of this life (1853-1869) that spanned
the Civil War, slavery and freedom, as well as rural antebellum Alabama
and urban Reconstruction-era Ohio provides insight into meanings of
freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency in the post-emancipation mo-
121 Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled Archive,”
566.
122 Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, Vol. 26, (June 2008).