two cat skins and a whipping

For the last few months, I have been working on and off on a new research project on humans and non-humans in the social world of antebellum American slavery. Specifically, I'm interested in how enslaved people lived with, thought of, felt about animals. Now as in slavery times, it's common sense that slaves were treated like animals. But I'm interested in pushing that common sense a bit, and asking how such a thing happened in a world filled with actual non-human animals - cows and sheep that the enslaved tended as part of their daily labor, hogs and chickens that their masters sometimes let them raise, horses and oxen they drove, dogs they hunted with, dogs that hunted them.

So I've been collecting bits and pieces of this vast but largely overlooked realm of historical experience. The first ever post on this blog - which has since strayed off in various directions - was actually about a South Carolina slave and his dog, a mysterious and poignant episode unearthed by the historian John Campbell.

Last week I tried my unpracticed hand at some archival research, and turned up this odd fragment from the papers of a Georgia tannery owner named Elbert Baynes. Some context first: it seems that Baynes's customers generally procured their own animal skins and sent them to him for tanning and shoe-making. His papers included a number of paper scraps from customers, detailing what types of hides they sent, how many, what was to be done with them. This one was dated October 3, 1863,* from a certain Mr. William Roby:

All well, I send you by the boy Reuben one beef hide and 4 goat skins and 2 cat skins. Send Reuben back rite away whip him if dont start Tell Mr. Cofer to be sure to mark and book thes hids to recollect I have lost 2 hid by carelessness. (One big sic for original spelling errors)

Here we have a glimpse of a cat-skinning slave-owner who also appeared to have been a dickering, if not bullying, customer (Baynes's records showed that he owed Roby money). But then there is the faint but strangely luminous figure of "the boy" Reuben: skins in hand, himself threatened with whipping, likely by cowhide. How was he like or not like the "2 hid lost by carelessness" to his master - in this claustrophobic economy of hides, human and non-human?

What were these skins to him - and the animals they were before? Perhaps he also tended this cow and these goats. Perhaps there was no love lost between him and the cats. My very modest point here is that, whatever his feelings, they were a meaningful part of his existence, of his experience of being human on the edge of humanity.

* Quick follow-up (9/25/09): The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. By law, Reuben should have been free at this point - though in practice, this clearly was not the case.