Diary of a slave: Over 64 years, account sheds new light on changing era
WASHINGTON — "This is the History of Adam Francis Plummer."
It was a gutsy, audacious statement to make 162 years ago, when some Americans weren't supposed to have histories — at least not written in their own hand. Yet there it is, dreamily scrawled in cursive script across a crumbling page. The man seemed to relish the telling of it, too — fussing over each letter, elongating H's and curling F's.
For nearly a century, no one knew for sure that a history of the Maryland slave named Adam Francis Plummer really existed. His daughter Nellie insisted it did. But her well-to-do twin, Robert, wanted to keep it quiet, believing such gloomy, bitter memories of slavery were best left behind.
So a sad fate befell Adam's journal, 200 pages of composition paper with entries from his marriage in 1841 to his death in 1905, all bound in leather. It was stashed away by generations of distant relatives and, until recently, socked in a manila envelope in the suburban home of Lucille Betty Tompkins-Davis, a 50-year-old speech pathologist.
Last month, in an elaborate ceremony, Tompkins-Davis donated the diary of Adam Francis Plummer to the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture, where a conservator lords over it as if it were the Constitution — and with good reason:
The discovery of a slave diary written in real time may be unprecedented, according to appraisers and historians.
Historians' delight
"A firsthand account of a slave's life — while it is going on, not reminiscences as it clouds over time, but as it goes on — is extremely valuable," says Margaret Law Callcott, an author and historian who has searched for the diary since studying the family lore about it.
The ceremony was also a homecoming for the extended Plummer family, a group torn apart by slavery now reconnecting through Adam's writings. Family members continue to make the connections today as more relatives discover the writings and make pilgrimages to the suburban Prince George's County, Md., plantations where their ancestors once labored in bondage.
What is left of the fragile document is just 48 pages, down from the 200 or so described by relatives but lost somewhere over time. At the museum, it will be put into storage for preservation, brought out only for special occasions.
The diary is more a no-frills family Bible than a confessional: He records names, dates, births, marriages, deaths, receipts, inventories of his possessions ... lists. Expressions of emotion are rare.
From bondage to freedom
Adam "was born in the year of our lord 1819," a slave at a Prince George's plantation owned by the powerful Calvert family. Adam spent most of his slave life at the Riversdale plantation — today a house museum — rising to the position of plantation foreman, a job he continued after emancipation, for pay.
According to family lore, a black preacher taught Adam to read and write, which, although not illegal under Maryland law, was an offense outlawed in many Southern states and generally severely punished by slave owners, as the Plummer family learned the hard way. Several in-laws were sold off to prevent rebellion. Adam wrote letters to his wife, Emily Saunders Arnold Plummer, who lived with their eight children miles from Riversdale on nearby plantations.
He also kept meticulous records of his side jobs, which the Calvert family let their trusted slave conduct. For instance, in an entry from March 13, 1859, it appears that Plummer has been cheated by a man he was doing work for:
Joseph Jones imploy Adam Plummer to inclose his garden for him for 11 dollars by the 1st of March but has he has fale in so doin pay to Dollers and imploy me to inclose chicken yard for him for 3 dollars on pay full to all debt
Plummer made a decent living for a slave, which allowed him to upgrade his family's living arrangements when their owners provided them with poor living quarters. Still, the material things were cold comfort when his teenage daughter Sarah Miranda was sold to an owner in New Orleans. Or when several of his wife's siblings were sold down South. Or when two of her sisters froze to death walking in a blizzard to see their mother, who had spent time in a slave pen in Alexandria, Va.
Or when he watched his wife and children stand on the auction block. In one unusual burst of emotion, Plummer describes the uncertainty that followed when his family was sold from Washington to the Mount Hebron farm in suburban Howard County, Md.:
Brokeup and parted in the end of the your of 1855 December 22. I have a longtime looking. After five month loocking I get a letter (from Emily) date March 2nd 1856 Deziers to see me at Mont Hebron Ellicotts Mills, 20 milds an to and form we of think that I shall never be commeable (comfortable) again but o my God.
After emancipation, Adam's lists included the names of friends and family who lent him money to fetch Sarah Miranda from New Orleans, and the first wages that his wife and children were paid.
Perhaps the most triumphant listing was the two-year payment schedule for Mount Rose, the 10-acre homestead near suburban Hyattsville, Md., where the entire Plummer family could finally sleep under one roof — a home he enjoyed until his death in 1905.
paid in full 17 JAN 1870
Running commentary
Nellie Arnold Plummer's fingerprints are all over her father's diary. She is the prim Washington public schoolteacher born into slavery in 1860 who scribbled in its margins, providing commentary, spelling corrections and explanatory footnotes.
After her father died, Nellie continued writing in the diary's empty pages, etching in poetry and love letters commemorating the anniversaries of her parents' births and deaths well into the 1920s. Historians cringe at Nellie's "corrections," but without her extraordinary efforts, her father's diary might never have seen the light of modern day.
Nellie was the first woman to attend Wayland Seminary, a Washington college for freed slaves, which eventually merged into Virginia Union University, where she was a classmate of Booker T. Washington. She had a distinguished 40-year career as a teacher and principal in Washington-area schools.
Well into her 60s, Nellie wrote a book, "Out of the Depths, or the Triumph of the Cross." The sometimes meandering account of the Plummer family begins in the Revolutionary War, when Adam's grandfather, Cupid Plummer, was sent to fight in place of his master. Like Adam, Nellie records many names, birth dates, marriages and other information about the family.
But the book caused a huge rift. Her siblings had become men and women of station — church founders, Army chaplains and nurses — and some saw no need to re-invoke the horrors of slavery. Her twin, Robert Francis Plummer, who had become a noted pharmacist, especially opposed it.
"Robert didn't want her to write it because he was a little embarrassed about what took place," said Nicholas Saunders Plummer Davis Sr., who, at 84, recalls living at Mount Rose at the same time as his Aunt Nellie and Uncle Robert. "But she did it anyhow. Nellie, she was a very shrewd and smart woman."
Nellie printed up as many copies as possible in 1927. Before her death in 1933, she did two other things to ensure that her father's writings would live on: First, she bypassed the haughty Plummers and instead gave her father's diary to Edward Arnold, a maternal cousin, for safekeeping. She also mailed books to relatives around the country. In some places, she sent boxes full of books to the town postmaster with instructions that they be given to anyone with the names Arnold or Plummer.
"Out of the Depths" became known simply as "The Book," kept and cherished by generations. In 1997, it was reprinted by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates in his series on African-American women writers.
Making the connection
Two years ago, Tompkins-Davis came across a Washington Post article about an exhibit at the Riversdale House Museum about the legacy of Adam Francis Plummer. It noted that his descendants had been finding one another through a book — The Book, the same one her family had stored in an attic for 70 years. Her great-great-grandfather, William Robert Arnold, was in that book.
The newspaper article said the diary the book was based on had gone missing. Tompkins-Davis had that in her attic, too. For years it had been housed in the Arnold family house, then in her mother's house and finally in Tompkins-Davis' bungalow in suburban Cheverly, Md.
She picked up the phone and called the Rev. L Jerome Fowler, the family historian, who had just organized a Plummer reunion. For the next two years, Fowler and Tompkins-Davis tried to find a suitable home for the diary. Now it's at the Smithsonian, and Tompkins-Davis has been introduced to dozens of relatives.
"It has connected me with distant relatives, people I had never known existed," says Tompkins-Davis. "It has opened my world to a wonderful world of relationships that I wouldn't have been privy to if not for these extraordinary people who realized that writing things down would be so important for the next generations."