Upstairs at the McGrady-Brockman House, the very shelves that hold the hundreds of boxes of historical documents are historic. They look like they were transported from the 1940s, and although they’re sort of neat and retro, if you don’t put the boxes back just right, all the boxes on the shelf will fall askew. One afternoon after I righted some the shelves and replaced all the boxes, I grabbed a box at random, opened it and pulled a file (also at random) and opened it. Just to see what was in all these boxes.
I had grabbed a relatively thin file, just three documents from 1822, but it’s how I met Judah. The top of the larger document read “The petition of Judah, A woman of colour,” and in the file was the paperwork for Judah’s petition for freedom from her bond of indentured servitude. It’s important to mention here that slavery and involuntary servitude were prohibited by the ordinance of 1787 as well as the Indiana constitution of 1816. This petition, like I said, was from 1822. Indentured servitude was an attempt to sidestep laws that made slavery illegal. After 1787, the choice for most freed blacks in the state was indentured servitude. With the hope of eventual freedom, blacks signed away a half century of more of their lives or more with an “X” at the bottom of a contract they couldn’t read. The other choice: to be sold back into slavery in Louisiana among other places.
Judah’s petition isn’t the only of its kind in our archives. Mary Clark and Polly Strong are certainly more well known, but how many Judah’s are up there? What was Judah’s last name? Where did she come from? Where did she go? Was she tall? Did she have children? A spouse? In 1800, Knox County had the largest black population in Indiana. But where are those files and who are those people?
A few days after I stumbled across Judah’s file I was looking through some probate records. Among them I found a will filed in April of 1817. In it, John Small bequeathed to his wife, Polly, “…my Negro women Judah and Nanny with my black boy George and Negro Girl…” the names are barely legible but they’re there. Could this be the same Judah? After Small died would Judah’s servitude have been transferred to one of Small’s sons had his widow remarried. A question so obscene as to make you second guess your own eyes and ask, “what the hell am I reading?” But now, we are able to possibly make a first connection in building an identity for Judah.
The prime role of the McGrady-Brockman House in Vincennes is to help families explore their genealogy, but make no mistake: these documents are more than just lists of names. The handwriting on these pages tells the story of black history, not just in Vincennes, but Indiana, the Northwest Territory and a young country as it grappled with democracy.
At McGrady-Brockman this year we’re pursuing grants to, among other things, index and digitize the history of Indiana’s largest black population of the early 19th century. By making different groups of county records accessible digitally, it’s our hope that people may be able to make enough connections to learn about their ancestors and from where they came and at the same time shed a long overdue light on black history in Indiana and Knox County.
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