Albert Oetgen is a retired journalist. He was a reporter for the Savannah Morning News from 1976 to 1980 and also reported for newspapers in Richmond, Virginia and Tallahassee, Florida. He has worked as a producer for ABC World News Tonight, NBC and CBS Evening News. He is working on a biography of Savannah civil rights icon WW Law.
Slavery was a central theme in WW Law’s pioneering effort to chronicle the history of Savannah’s African American community. As an adult, he read extensively on the subject.
But the civil rights leader’s knowledge of slavery was by no means limited to books. His knowledge of slavery was rooted in his early childhood.
It started with Abraham Barnard, a 90-year-old former slave.
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Barnard was an iconic figure in Savannah’s African-American community and one of the earliest major influences on the law outside of the young child’s immediate family. “Little West” Law was born on January 1, 1923 in a house on West Gwinnett Street, just two blocks from the house where Barnard had lived for more than 40 years. Barnard and Little West’s grandmother, Lillie Belle Wallace, became neighbors in 1910, but their families had known each other for much longer. They were fellow members of the First Bryan Baptist Church. Church records show that Barnard and Lillie Belle Wallace’s mother, Sarah Johnson, both contributed to the Church building fund in 1873. Both had been born into slavery.
Shortly after Little West turned three in 1926, his family — grandmother Lillie Belle, father Westley “Big West Law, mother Geneva and sister Dorothy — moved to 33rd Street. Their new home was in the middle of a block long row of identical rentals in the busy Cuyler-Brownsville neighborhood. There were four rooms and a small kitchen for the three adults and two children of the Wallace/Law family.
Another baby was on the way. To make ends meet, they rented one of the rooms to Abraham Barnard.
Sharing lessons on the steps of 33rd Street
There is no known documentation of his exact date of birth, but U.S. Census records suggest that Barnard was about 92 when he moved into the home on 33rd Street. He drew the attention of Little West and stimulated the youngsters’ imaginations with his descriptions of plantation life on nearby coastal islands, the start of the Civil War, and his later adventures in which he encountered exotic sailors from faraway places while guiding ships on the loaded and unloaded in the busy Savannah River.
The world of Little West Law was safe and stable compared to the chaotic world of plantation slavery and civil war that Barnard described to him.
The depth of the suffering Barnard’s family endured is documented in the records of the Savannah branch of Freedmen’s Savings Bank. Reconstruction Era Bank authorities routinely interviewed formerly enslaved account holders about their lives before emancipation and recorded the responses alongside routine entries of deposits and withdrawals.
Barnard’s bank records show that his mother Charlotte died as an enslaved woman circa 1840 when Abraham was five or six years old. His brothers Richard and Alex were sold to New Orleans. Two sisters, Hagar and Sarah Ann, were both dead by 1870. His father James emigrated to Liberia where he died, never to see his surviving children again. What James Barnard had to do to get to Africa and how news of his death got back to Georgia is unknown. It is the legacy of the instability of enslavement that none of the dates are concrete, none of the locations are certain, none of the circumstances have been recorded in real-time.
Barnard told Little West he was a Civil War veteran, a drummer boy in a Confederate militia unit. If Barnard ever identified his unit or who was responsible for his attachment, Law did not recall. No details of Barnard’s involvement in the war survive him. It was not uncommon for wealthy Confederate slaveholders to bring their enslaved people with them when they went to war, and it’s possible that happened in Barnard’s case.
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Barnard owned a suitcase, which he kept under the cramped house on 33rd Street, where there were no closets and nails were used for hangers. WW Law said Barnard would take out the case and show its contents to dramatize his Civil War stories. Inside was a treasure trove of military and fraternal regalia that captured Little West’s imagination. Among the clothes Barnard kept in the trunk were remnants of what he told the boy as his Civil War uniform.
“I would put on the uniform and march through the yard,” Law said. Imagining what Barnard’s Civil War experience had been like, he said, “was one of the things that whetted my appetite for the history of our people.”
Barnard’s suitcase also contained sashes, ribbons, medals, and other emblems of his membership in Prince Hall Masons, the oldest and largest predominantly African-American fraternity in the United States. He would sort through the artifacts and explain to Little West what they were and what they symbolized, holding back the secrets he had pledged to keep while he seduced the child with their secrets. “I’ve heard history since I was very young,” Law said. “The old people spoke of black leaders. Most were preachers, mostly Baptists. Some were businessmen and brother leaders.”
Barnard, he said, was one of those fraternal leaders, “an officer of the Lodge.” The fraternal lodges were among the most important institutions shaping Law’s traditionalist ideology. Its members were often the focus of the oral traditions he recited to various audiences, highlighting the achievements of Savannah’s African American community. The stories Law told acted as counterpoints to the dominant narratives spun for generations by white historians and journalists who largely ignored black history.
A fulfilling life
Barnard’s personal stories were among Law’s first encounters with storytelling and racial pride.
Although no clear record of Abraham Barnard’s enslavement has been discovered, records of his account with the Savannah branch of Freedman’s Bank show that he was living on Skidaway Island in 1870. The 1850 and 1860 U.S. Census lists of enslaved persons include slave owners named Barnard. Other records indicate that a prominent slaveowning family named the Barnard owned plantations on Skidaway and adjacent Ossabaw dating back to the early 19th century, retained some plots, and kept some of the farmhands for the first few years after Emancipation.
Freedmen sometimes took the names of the families that enslaved them. Barnard may have been affiliated with a slave owner who fought in the Civil War, but there are no official records of such arrangements. and no letters or other private accounts of what he did and where he may have traveled have emerged outside of WW Law’s recollections.
Real estate records show that Barnard regularly paid taxes on land and cattle, which he began accumulating soon after his liberation and into the 1920s. He is listed in city directories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a farmer and longshoreman. He appears to have alternated cultivating land on and near Skidaway Island and working as a longshoreman on the Savannah River.
Law worked to realize rights that Barnard was denied
In his later years, Barnard still owned and maintained a small property adjacent to the separate municipal cemeteries near his home on Gwinnett Street. The old man continued to grow vegetables there after moving in with the Wallace/Law family. He appointed Lillie Belle Wallace as executor and she looked after him in his final years.
Barnard first registered during Reconstruction, when the federal government forced Georgian officials to allow freedmen to vote. He continued to pay poll taxes and cast ballots in general elections until the early 20th century, when draconian literacy tests imposed by Georgian officials made it impossible for the former slave and others like him to vote anymore.
From the archive:Savannah’s WW Law
A bond application Barnard signed with business associates who intended to open a tavern in 1889 reveals the reason: Despite all his financial and civic achievements, Abraham Barnard never learned to read or write. He signed the application for a license to open an inn with an “X”.
WW Law spent his life fighting the legalized discrimination that curtailed the civil rights denied to Abraham Barnard and thousands of others with the advent of the Jim Crow era.
More than 70 years after Abraham Barnard’s death, Law simply described him in the reverential tone reserved for few people save his mother and grandmother. “He was an upstanding man,” Law recalled. He said Grandmother Lillie Belle instructed the children to “be respectful and stay in their place” around the old man.
Abraham Barnard died when Little West was barely four, but memories of the stories he told never faded, nor the meaning of the life he led in the face of ongoing adversity.
