Race, Freedom, and Belonging in a Relational Midwest

Race, Freedom, and Belonging in a Relational Midwest Jennifer Kirsten Stinson (bio) The nineteenth-century rural Upper Midwest was a world of relationships and intersections between a great variety of peoples. Therefore, it is fertile ground for examining how members of the region's African diaspora, their kin, and their neighbors constructed race, freedom, and belonging. The Upper Mississippi Valley's farm neighborhoods, trade routes, mineral diggings, and small towns formed crossroads. 1 Those who met there—whether native-born white southerners and northeasterners; African American, African French, African-Lumbee-Cherokee, and African Ojibwe people with southern, Missouri, and Great Lakes roots; Bohemian, Danish, German, Irish, Norwegian, and Swedish immigrants; or Ho-Chunks, Mesquakies, and Sauks—held culturally varied ideas about race and belonging. The African diasporic people among them also embraced diverse priorities for advancing freedom and sovereignty in a region marked with successes but also challenges. Family relationships figured centrally in how African diasporic Midwesterners understood their racial or Indigenous identities, as well as in how white Midwesterners perceived race. African diasporic people, moreover, acted within nuclear and extended family units to advance their freedom, belonging, and authority. Struggles and losses also resonated at the family level. Indeed, family forms an important, often poignant lens through which to grasp how Midwesterners registered and navigated pivotal changes and shifting power within their own lives and within the region, the nation, and beyond. 2 Migration to the Midwest and transitions out of enslavement were among the changes the Shepard family faced. In 1850, they founded the Pleasant Ridge farm neighborhood in Grant County, Wisconsin after journeying End Page 165 from Virginia with the Horner family. Although Caroline Shepard was freeborn, delayed manumission from the Horners had only just taken effect for her husband Charles and brother-in-law Isaac; Isaac's fiancé Sarah Brown remained enslaved. The Shepards ultimately became landowners, known for aiding escapees from slavery and sharecropping. They ran the local school in cooperation with white neighbors. 3 However, the Horners initially owned the land the Shepards farmed, and liberating Brown burdened Isaac with raising the 1, 000 they demanded. Keeping and honoring family ties—a constituent part of meaningful freedom—was challenging, too. Letters between Caroline Shepard and her Virginia kin aimed to bridge the nine hundred miles between them. Shepard wrote of her daughters to her aunt Caroline Mason, wishing that Mason could see how "Harriet is learning to knit and sew" and observe that "Mary Jane is walking all about now and can say a few words. " Shepard wanted Mason to know she had honored her advice to "Set your children a good example and bring them up in the fear of God. "4 However, other kin asked for money or chided the Wisconsin Shepards when it failed to arrive. Sarah Shepard urged them to "stop bestowing so much charity on other folks" in Wisconsin "and help me some. "5 Even as the Shepards started a new, free life as Midwesterners, the undertows of southern slavery and family obligations tugged. Efforts to create belonging and enrich freedom persisted beyond settlement and into Reconstruction. Nearly two decades after arrival in Wisconsin, the Washingtons—formerly enslaved in Washington D. C. but living in Prescott, Pierce County by the 1870s—joined together as family to advance those efforts. Lewis and Catherine Washington and their children sang concerts of what a local newspaper called "plantation revival hymns. " The concerts, in connection to the family's well-known abolitionist and civil rights activism, promoted racial uplift. They also countered racist stereotypes that travelling minstrel shows brought to Pierce County audiences. At the same time, the concerts integrated southern musical idioms into the Midwestern soundscape. When the Washingtons sang a southern African American genre at the same venues where neighboring native-born whites and European immigrants performed their homelands' music, the family reinforced their own and whites' sense that African Americans belonged culturally in the Midwest. 6 The Revels kindred of the late 1800s navigated a Midwest where stereotypes of southern sharecroppers and Indigenous people threatened to compromise their family's belonging. The Revelses, who founded a End Page 166 farm neighborhood in Forest Township, Vernon County, Wisconsin had arrived—primarily. . .