In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs recounted how her grandmother had loaned her mistress $300, which was used to purchase a silver candelabra. Upon her mistress’s death, Jacobs’s grandmother applied to the estate’s executor to be repaid, but was told that the estate was insolvent. Instead, the executor sold her to pay other debts, but retained the candelabra. Jacobs noted, “I presume it will be handed down in the family, from generation to generation”(Harriet A Jacobs, 1861/1987). Jacobs’s grandmother’s freedom was sacrificed for the wealth of white descendants. The candelabra was not unique. It may still be out there in someone’s cupboard or attic, but regardless there are thousands of other objects in museums and bourgeois dining rooms, with similar stories (Janet Neary, 2016). Harlem-based interior designer Sheila Bridges hints at these material histories with her piece Tarnish (2017)—a large silver spoon made for the exhibition New York Silver, Then and Now (6.28.17-7.1.18). On its handle is a geometric pattern derived from A print of a slave ship, the Brooks, 1789. One of the most famous abolitionist images, this diagram revealed the packed conditions of the slave ship’s hold. Each indentation in this pattern marks a human who was kidnapped and transported across the seas. Inscribed in the bowl of the spoon is a kneeling figure, accompanied by a banner that entreats “Am I not a man and a brother?”. This image was part of the visual language of abolition and was widely circulated on medallions made by the Wedgewood company (see James Walvin, 2017). Begging for mercy, the figure invites white abolitionists to imagine themselves as heroic saviors of a subjugated other. By placing the enslaved figure in the bowl of a serving spoon, Bridges reminds us that while abolitionists fought against slavery they did not imagine the enslaved as their equals. Indeed, the paternalistic quality of much abolitionist imagery suggests that they imagined freed slaves and their descendants to be in their debt (the debt incurred by freedom is perhaps most explicit in the indemnity of 90 million francs that the French government extracted from Haiti in exchange for diplomatic recognition after the revolution of 1804. For further discussion of the debt incurred by freedom, see Tim Armstrong, 2012). In practice, descendants of slaves were frequently condemned to domestic servitude, often ending up polishing the family silver.

Bridges deliberately references the enslaved who mined silver in South America, but her spoon also invokes the ways in which so many family fortunes rest on entanglements with slavery. Tarnish plays on the idiom “born with a silver spoon in their mouth,” which equates silverware with inherited wealth. This idiom became commonplace precisely because silver spoons were (and in some circles remain) a customary gift commemorating a birth or a wedding; rituals that inscribe heritable wealth (the tradition emerged in an era when banks and currency were unreliable and silverware was considered a “safe” investment, a means of storing wealth and rendering it transferable). Both in the plantocracies of the Atlantic British colonies and within Britain, ornaments have historically reflected an aesthetics (and ethics) of “conspicuous consumption” that was born out of class anxiety and the desire to show oneself to have both taste and means. The dinner table was the site of such conspicuous consumption, both literally and metaphorically—the place where British and American families consumed the sugar produced by slaves and presented an opportunity to display wealth through fine silverware, which would be handed down to generations. While the term “heirloom” has come to designate any item of financial, historical, or sentimental significance, in the early fifteenth century, the term—then written as “Ayre lome”—meant “inherited tool or implement.” These adornments have formed part of a language of power, a colonial technology that demonstrates not only wealth, but also knowledge of the etiquette of the dining room, a signal of belonging at the table. That belonging was often conditioned on enslavement and, as Harriet Jacobs foresaw, it remains heritable. As they pass from parent to child, heirlooms reproduce and naturalize generational wealth. Traveling down generations, they invite the descendants of slave owners to take up their (deadly) whiteness, as though it were a benign matter of style and sensibility, as though such sensibilities did not drive the system of kidnapping, transportation, and enslavement by which whiteness birthed itself. Such objects make the legacy of transatlantic slavery concrete: the security and well-being of some and the precarious lives of others.

Bridges’ spoon reveals how these ornamental objects that were once fungible with human life, mechanisms that stored value extracted from enslaved bodies, embody and reproduce extraordinary violence. Ultimately, Tarnish collapses the distance between the dining room and the plantation field. It also collapses the conceptual disconnect between then and now. Silver, after all, tarnishes over time. Tarnishing—a darkening, a loss of luster, a discoloration, a corrosion, a stain. Slavery—a stain, on history, on nations, on families. By showing that the spoils of chattel slavery are in our midst, Tarnish is an accusation in and of the bourgeois dining room, an indictment of heirlooms. This, then, is a call to decolonize the dining room.

References

Harriet A Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1861/1987), 20.

Janet Neary, Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 159.

James Walvin, Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits (Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).

Tim Armstrong The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

This is one of five essays from the fourth transmission of b.O.s. (Black One Shot), a special digital edition of ASAP/J edited by Michael Gillespie and Lisa Uddin.