Derek Krisoff (Senior Editor, University of Georgia Press) interviews Mark Auslander about “The Accidental Slaveowner.”

DK: How did you first encounter Catherine Boyd, popularly known as “Miss Kitty”?

MA: I first learned of “Miss Kitty” in September 1999, when I began teaching on Emory’s original campus, in Oxford, Georgia. Since we were studying race, memory and social space,  I took my Introduction to Sociology students on two very different  tours of the city cemetery; a local white man led us through the historically white section of the cemetery and a local African American man took us through the African American cemetery. The two tours were mirror opposites of one another, based on entirely different understandings of race and power. But both tours culminated at the same gravesite of an enslaved woman, known to local whites as “Kitty” and to local African Americans “Miss Kitty.” I was fascinated that for all the racial and class divisions in the town its citizens seemed united in their fascination with the story of Kitty/Miss Kitty. To be sure, they drew very different lessons from her life and from the large stone tablet dedicated to her memory. For most whites she exemplified the loyal slave, the beloved Mammy, loyal to her white master and mistress unto death.  For virtually all local African Americans, her story was a tragic illustration of the sexual exploitation of women of color, in slavery and freedom, by powerful whites. How I wondered had the story been passed on through white and African American families across the generations? What had the narrative meant at different historical moments? And what might really have happened to Miss Kitty, her descendants, and the other enslaved people owned by Bishop James Osgood Andrew, who were at issue in the great 1844 schism of the Methodist Church that presaged the Civil War? Those  questions t preoccupied me for the decade that I worked on the book. Seeking answers finally led me to learn  that Miss Kitty’s name, in the eyes of her own family, had been” Catherine Boyd.” And that discovery finally led me to her living descendants.

DK: You recently participated in a conference at Emory about slavery and American universities. Tell me how the Kitty-Bishop Andrew myth fits in.  What does it reveal about the relationship between higher education and slavery?

MA: For generations, the standard white narrative of Kitty and Bishop Andrew had functioned, in a sense as the official “charter myth” of Emory University. Kitty’s loyalty to the Bishop was taken by most whites associated with the University as exemplary of the relations of mutual understanding, kindness and deference that had existed between the races at Emory since its founding.  Oxford was usually presented as a kind of “paradise” or utopian community in which the races coexisted peacefully and affectionately.  Slavery through this tale was rendered, at heart, a benign institution. By  extension, Jim Crow, it was argued, was represented as comparatively mild, at least at Emory and in the Atlanta environs. Critically revisiting the story of Miss Kitty, and the countless other enslaved people who built and labored at scores of American colleges and universities forces us to re-examine this conventional perspective. Institutions of higher learning, from their ecclesiastical origins in the late Middle Ages, have indeed had utopian characteristics. But these utopian landscapes have long rested upon histories of exploited labor on an epic scale, dramatically based on the vast capital generated through the Atlantic slave trade and the political economy of chattel slavery.  Beyond these vast abstract dynamics, the Kitty-Andrew story, I like to think, helps to humanize our thinking about higher education and enslavement, reminding us of the nuanced relations, of structural violence as well as social intimacy, that pervaded, and still pervade, the academy to this day.

DK: In an effort to correct the Kitty myth, you undertook some impressive detective work.  Can you say a little about how you met Catherine Boyd’s descendents, Darcel and Cynthia Caldwell, and how they’ve reacted to your work?

MA: I had a lucky break late one night in Atlanta, staying at the home of dear friends who work at Emory.  After a long inconclusive day in the State Archives , I was sitting on the sofa with their cat Tolstoy sleeping on my lap, partly covered my laptop. Worried about disturbing Tolstoy I kept working on line, reaching around the cat’s furry belly. I had learned at the National Archives in Washington D.C. that Kitty’s second son was named Russell Nathan Boyd; might he have been named for his father I asked Tolstoy, who purred approvingly.  So I called up Freedman’s Savings Bank records on Ancestry.com, and lo and behold, there was a “Nathan Boyd,” opening a bank account in Atlanta in 1871, listing as his wife “Catherine, Dead” and as his eldest son, “Alfred Boyd.”  That led me and my wife to Keosauqua, Iowa, where Alfred had settled after the Civil War, and along the trail of African Methodist Episcopal churches he had pastored in the midwest, leading to the church in Rockford, Illinois where his great grandson Mr. Caldwell, an enormously kind man in his eighties, served as trustee.   He immediately had me telephone his adult daughters Darcel and Cynthia on the East coast.

The sisters were I think, initially taken aback, wondering if I was some sort of nut. But they quickly and carefully examined the evidence and became convinced that Catherine Boyd/Miss Kitty was indeed their great great great grandmother. They have become her proud and passionate advocates, and have been invaluable partners as we have tried to reconstruct aspects of her and Nathan’s lives. They both attended the Emory conference on slavery and universities in February 2011 and spoke beautifully at the closing ceremony in Oxford.  The African American congregation of Grace United Methodist Church welcomed them “home” with a deeply moving memory quilt, created with the help of artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier. Seeing Lynn, Darcel and Cynthia unfurl the quilt as the children of the community read aloud the names of the enslaved persons of Oxford was one of the very most moving things I’ve ever witnessed. All of us, whatever our precise relationship to histories of enslavement, had the uncanny sense of having come “home” in profound ways.