Faith Works 8-18-23

Faith Works 8-18-23
Jeff Gill

Enduring biases and transforming our views
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Last week my offering to you was from 250 years ago, when Rev. David Jones makes the first written record of people residing in Licking County.

His account effectively begins what we traditionally know as "history," with events and activity before that "prehistory" simply because we have only artifacts and remains to work from, not a written record.

The curtain comes up in 1773, not all the way nor to a fully lit stage, but we get a clear glimpse of part of the setting. As a local historian, I've gone back many times to Gist's earlier but unpopulated journal of 1751, Jones's account, and the later reports of Indian Billy Dragoo who passed through in the 1780s but gave his account decades later, or Isaac & Katherine Stadden's impressions in 1800, also recorded later around 1870.

All of this makes the detailed Jones account of 1753 incredibly important, and again, I've looked it up and read many times through the Licking County section, along with the narrative of the weeks before and after for clues to the landscape and peoples and customs of the day.

But it has only been on my more recent reading that something incredibly obvious finally became clear to me. Rev. Jones's party is entertained by the village chief, a woman who is clearly in charge, and she clears out what is called the "negro quarter" which is a substantial structure with a smoke vent in the ceiling and room for at least half a dozen adults. That observation is footnoted that the chief "has several negroes who were taken from Virginia in time of last war, and now esteemed as her property."

There are long discussions to be had about the role and place of slavery among Native Americans in the colonial era, but the language here is unclear about "esteemed as," which could mean the people were considered her property, or that this status is how others saw it, but she was sheltering them from enslavement here north of the Ohio.

In either case, it does mean without doubt that African Americans were here as local residents before any European Americans came as settlers, a period which comes almost thirty years later, in 1800. Most "historical" later accounts call people like Ratliff and Hughes, the Staddens, folks named Beard and Van Buskirk and a family of Joneses, in some sequence, as the pioneers or settlers of Licking County.

To be fair, we have no names. History likes names; we make connections and follow families through them. But those "several negroes" with a home somewhere near Elliott's Run north of Raccoon Creek as part of the Shawnee woman's village, whose name is also essentially hidden from us: they were here first.

And for too many years, they were invisible to me. I read this passage over many times, but their personhood and pre-eminence had been invisible to me, because I could not or did not see them.

Friends, that is racism. My racism. My own inability to see something right in front of me because of inherent racial assumptions about who is first, who is in charge, who has status. Fortunately the record endures, and blessedly my awareness has changed. But the fact remains. Because of racism, I missed this for far too long. I lift them up now so we all can see, and wonder, and envision them. What was their life like here in a place we call home? How did they live and worship and love and die?

We're just beginning to see many things about our history more clearly.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still amazed how long he missed these folk in plain view. Tell him how you've seen what you'd previously missed at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.