B. Mayfield “People get ready, there’s a train a-comingYou don’t need no baggage, you just get on board.” —“PEOPLE GET READY” Mansfield, Louisiana, circa 1910—Slavery was dead, but its terror still hung in the hot air over the cotton fields near my great-grandmother’s house. The crack of the master’s whip echoed through the generations of her family up to her own grandparents, who as slaves were worth almost $800 on the trading block in their prime. After suffering in bondage so long, they couldn’t help but feel their current freedom was negotiable. Like much about my great-grandmother’s birth, a cloud surrounds her real name. She sometimes introduced herself as Gertrude, while others knew her as Annabelle, but most likely she went by Annie Bell. Such confusion about names occurred often in the land of slavery. Negroes could never know their true last names, and even first names could carry the indelible imprint of the plantation. For almost two centuries, they traded in nicknames and pseudonyms, perhaps as a way to assume control of their identity in a world that gave them none.
