APPENDIX ITEM
DEEDS, UNBOUND – A story sample
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Nance
By Susanna Ashton
Nance must have worried. To be deeded to a white family member—especially one on the cusp of marriage—was to face the unknown with no agency, no map. For anyone, such a transfer would be unsettling. For an enslaved girl, it was a quiet catastrophe. The future, already uncertain, now tilted toward the ominous.
In 1829, when the enslaver Jeremiah Field gifted Nance to his teenage daughter Malinda, the gesture was cloaked in the language of paternal affection. But for Nance, it likely signaled the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. A new chapter that would take her far from the only home she had known. Everything would change. Malinda Field, not yet twenty, would soon marry Joseph Donaldson and leave Pickens County, South Carolina, taking Nance and other enslaved people with her.
The Pickens County deed itself, a brief legal document from that fall, offers a rare glimpse into the machinery of inheritance and the casual cruelty of its logic. Jeremiah Field, a prosperous landowner with considerable acreage, gathered witnesses. This included relatives, neighbors, and perhaps a lawyer, and he signed over five enslaved children to his younger offspring. The language was perfunctory, the tone paternal. He was, after all, a man preparing for death. His complete will and testament, filed elsewhere, accounted for land, investments, and livestock. But this deed told a more intimate story: children given to children. It was all legal and tidy, as far as the paperwork was concerned.
The document omits Field’s adult son from a previous marriage and focuses solely on the four younger children from his second marriage. Among the five enslaved children mentioned (Nance, Ben, Sam, David, and Aaron), only Nance was identified as a girl. She was given to Malinda, Field’s only daughter. It is tempting, though speculative, to imagine that Ben, also given to Malinda, might have been Nance’s younger brother. Without knowledge of their parents, we cannot know their connection, but they certainly would have spent some amount of time together; perhaps they were even raised together. The records are silent on such bonds.
What this Pickens County deed does make clear is that any children born to Nance would become the property of Malinda’s children. The generational entanglement was deliberate. Jeremiah Field was not just transferring labor; he was binding Malinda’s and Nance’s futures together in a way that would echo through generations.
Perhaps the timing of the gift was strategic. Malinda was on the verge of marriage, and Field, perhaps aware of his declining health, sought to ensure she would not leave without the domestic support he deemed necessary. For Nance, the implications were stark. She would be uprooted, forced to follow Malinda into a new household, a new state, a new life. She had no say. Whether that life would be gentler or harsher, she could not know.
As it happened, Nance and Malinda did not vanish into isolation. Within a few years of the deed, Joseph Donaldson took both the enslaved woman and her enslaver (Malinda – although at this point Nance likely had passed into the ownership of Malinda’s husband Joseph) away. They moved to Cherokee County, Georgia, a region nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was hilly there, but not mountainous, and evidently offered some opportunities for the young white married couple to establish what they hoped would be a prosperous future built on the labor of captives. There, they were joined, or perhaps precede, by three of Malinda’s brothers. Even the patriarch Jeremiah Field himself would follow to Georgia, where his grave in Cherokee County, GA, would eventually mark his death in 1831.[1] If the rest of the Field family brought with them the people they had enslaved back in South Carolina, which seems likely, then Nance may have found herself, at least in part, among familiar faces. A small mercy, perhaps.
We cannot say with certainty how old Nance was at the time of the deed. The term “girl” used in the deed was elastic, often applied to women well into adulthood. But the 1830 Federal Census, taken a year after this gift was made, offers clues. A year after the transfer and before the move to Georgia, the census lists forty enslaved people in the Field household.[2] Among them: six girls under ten, four between ten and twenty-three, and two women aged twenty-six to fifty-four. Nance was likely among them. Given the common practice of assigning enslaved children to white children of similar age, it is plausible that Nance was one of the four older girls. These girls were old enough to be separated from their mother, old enough to serve.
By 1850, Cherokee County, Georgia, where Nance had been taken, had a population of just over 11,000. In contrast, Malinda and Nance’s county of origin, Pickens County, South Carolina, had a population closer to 14,000. It was a modest difference. But for Nance, the shift in geography may have felt immense. The 1860 Slave Schedule lists Malinda Field Donaldson and Joseph Donaldson with a household in Georgia with 35 enslaved people, including an unnamed Black enslaved woman of roughly 55 years of age –she could have been Nance.[3] The records, as always, are frustratingly opaque.
And yet, a thread emerges to tell a story of the post-emancipation era and how Nance’s story may have unfolded: In the 1880 Census, a free Black woman named “Nancy Donaldson’ appears in Cherokee County, Georgia, still near the white Field descendants.[4] She is listed as a widow, working as a housekeeper, and living with three teenage grandchildren, all of whom are farm laborers.
Is this the same Nance? We cannot be sure. She may have changed her name, taken a husband’s surname, or moved elsewhere. But the proximity, the surname, the role—caretaker, matriarch—suggest a continuity that feels more than coincidental.
If the Nancy Donaldson listed in the 1880 census in Georgia was “Nance,” the same girl who was given away by Joseph Field to his daughter Malinda in 1829, then she survived. She endured. She built a family. And she stayed. By 1880, her grandchildren, clustered around her in the census record, are a quiet testament to resilience. One imagines she would not allow them to be torn from her, as she had once been torn from her own family. Nance kept them close.
[1] See Jeremiah Field’s grave marker in the Fields Chapel Methodist Church cemetery in Sutallee, Cherokee County, Georgia, United States of America. Ancestry.com. U.S., Find a Grave® Index, 1600s-Current [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.
[2] See “Jeremiah Field” Year: 1830; Census Place: Pickens, South Carolina; Series: M19; Roll: 173; Page: 319; Family History Library Film: 0022507
[3] The National Archives in Washington, DC; Washington, DC, USA; Eighth Census of the United States 1860; Series Number: M653; Record Group: Records of the Bureau of the Census; Record Group Number: 29
[4] See “Nancy Donaldson” in the US Census of 1880. Year: 1880; Census Place: Canton, Cherokee, Georgia; Roll: 139; Page: 124a; Enumeration District: 020