Having completed the transcription and annotation of Peter Williamson’s fortunate work, there remains only the chronology of white slavery in America and three book reviews for the glossary to wrap up this searing process. We stand lucky that Peter was blessed with incredibly bad fortune, and also the gift of an education. Peter spoke and wrote on behalf of tens of thousands of illiterate slaves, who, according to most history books did not exist! Without Peter and a few others, and the ability to salvage the few shreds of truth from the mountainous deceptions rising all around us, we would be fated to believe in the Lie that binds us. Thanks to a few literate survivors of a sorrowful past, Peter Williamson foremost among them, we can get a glimpse of the world that was, and yet, cannot have been.
Liberals, humanists, academics and other willing slaves will disbelief Peter’s wilderness adventures as Melville was disbelieved by the undead editors of his Polynesian adventures.
Sadly, most Blacks will disbelieve the notion that white slavery could be equal to the suffering of their own forefathers. This must be, for the story of their suffering is all that the undead fiends that shape opinion in this nation have left them, like abused children with nothing but horror movies to occupy them during their confinement in society’s basement.
Native Americans will discount Peter’s account of a brutal experience among what was essentially a post-apocalyptic war cult being ground to dust by generations of war, a warrior people “caught between two fires,” yet not, like so many before and since, going quietly into the night that denies they preceded it.
As someone who has devoted himself to the study of the interplay of European invaders and Native American resistance, and of slavery, for exactly forty years, I find Peter’s account lucid and believable, an account that was vetted by Scottish military veterans of the officer class who had served with him, and was considered as credible by the highest court in his homeland.
Peter died, in January 1799, 39 years after his vindication, most probably, of alcoholism and is barely remembered in his own land. In this reader’s view, Peter Williamson’s Curious Adventures, described against the backdrop of a Colonial America on the very verge of revolution, deeply and vastly divergent from the Colonial America as taught to U.S. citizens, permitted the lifting of a veil of lies. Finally, through Peter’s un-adorning, and even patriotic, eyes, a monolithic untruth that has been erected with such genius and attention to human gullibility that my previous two decades of research on the subject of my slave ancestors was often and regrettably hampered, has been drawn aside just enough to permit a discernment of the whole rancid fabric of a slave nation.
Until now I did not know that one could not understand Frederick Douglas [captive of a peculiarly, and perennially criminal, Maryland] without reading Peter Williamson. My ancestors, Irish and English, and the ancestors of my youngest son’s grandfather, Irish, Cornish, and Scotch, were sold into bondage in the English slave colonies of Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Canada, between 1630 and 1830. I did not understand this until my mid 30s.
However, from my first childhood memory I have known that some evil, invisible hand owned my social identity, and have, based on this creeping sensation alone—being, perhaps, a mere superstition—rejected with a burning hate the land of my birth and its malefic presumptions upon my identity. For whatever reason I possess this social disorder, it has driven me to plumb the unrevealed nooks of our past with a morbid curiosity.
In 1996, with the first inkling that more than three branches of my unremarkable family tree had their roots deeply sunk in the rotten soil of servitude, I plunged down the rabbit hole of a nation that did not exist, a people that were not owned, but rather the owners of others, a people that were not oppressed and hunted, but who oppressed and hunted others, merely because of the darkness of the others’ skin.
Now, having crawled out the nether end of that nonexistent hole, I find myself labeled as the son of slave owners, when it had been my ancestors that were owned. I have stood and watched as the slave descendent that rules the vile festering city of Baltimore declared open season on anyone of my racial type [resulting in a brutal race purge, undocumented except for my book War Drums, which has only sold 2 copies]. When she commanded the police to permit the descendants of the only people who have ever officially been enslaved in this land to rampage to their hearts' content, she effectively declared people of my type the guilty sons of the few slave masters that owned us all, with what ensured openly declared a form of "reparations for slavery" in my presence. I walk the streets of Baltimore [where decent white men drive], threatened on a weekly basis by the descendents of the slaves that were bought to replace my ancestors as they wriggled free of the evil yoke. It is such a constant occurrence I barely bother to note it. It is pleasing, in a sense, to know that my kind is hated enough for me to be singled out for a lonely unattended death, and if I survive at the expense of my hunters, to be slated for persecution before my masters and their still-loyal slaves.
Content to be of that most-hated type of human, the feral paleface, I understand that once, not far from here, just across the river-now-dammed, white men and black men banded together and fought the slave masters until they suffered betrayal and defeat, were crushed, scattered or repossessed, and that this will never happen again.
My few fellow palefaces with courage will always hate my black friends and reject common cause against that which owns us all.
The vast multitude of blacks not my friend will seek my destruction blindly at every turn.
Inwardly, this is a comfort, because the total commitment to keep us upright dogs of different hues at each others’ throats is at least a confirmation that there is something remaining in the minority of men that strikes fear into the Evil Organism that squats like an alien morality on the banks of what a better, now vanished, people once named the Wild-goose-river.
For those who have donated the source material for this project, most especially the anonymous person who gave me Peter’s memoir, thank you.
James LaFond,
Friday, January 22, 2016
From the Pit of that Most Evil City, Baltimore, on the eve of a storm that will unfortunately lack the fury to cleanse this vile slave-spawning soil of its corruption
