A Boston statehouse chamber fills with legislators on a cold February morning, and a petition bearing an X instead of a signature is laid on the clerk’s table.
It is 1783.
She does not just survive the crossing. She is about twelve years old on the coast of West Africa when kidnappers march her to the shore and sell her onto a ship, and she lives through what her own petition will later call a tormenting passage.
She does not just endure fifty years on a wealthy family’s estate outside Boston. She outlasts the family itself, which flees to Nova Scotia rather than side with the country being born around it.
She does not just accept being left behind with nothing. She is old, free in name only, with an infirm daughter and no income, in a state that has just finished fighting a war over the word liberty.
She does not just ask for charity. She petitions the Massachusetts legislature for a pension drawn from her former enslaver’s confiscated estate, the fortune her own unpaid labor helped build.
Her Spark of Liberty was a debt she made a government put its name to.
The legislature granted it. Governor John Hancock signed the order himself. In the same decade the country declared all men created equal, a woman who could not write her own name got a government to concede, in writing, that fifty years of stolen labor had a price and that she was owed it.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
The petition reads as polished, formal prose, and she could neither read nor write. Historians believe someone else, likely a literate ally in Boston’s Black community, put her account into the language the legislature would receive. The words were shaped for the room. The story was entirely hers: the kidnapping, the crossing, the fifty years, the abandonment.
The estate she petitioned against belonged to one of the wealthiest slaveholding families in Massachusetts, and part of that same fortune later endowed a professorship at Harvard Law School. Her claim and that endowment came out of the identical labor. One of them has been paid continuously for two hundred years.
It should have ended with Hancock’s signature. It did not. The payments stopped almost at once, and she petitioned again in 1785, then 1787, then 1788, then 1793, each time asking for money the state had already agreed she was owed. Some years brought a partial payment. Some years brought nothing. Her trail in the record goes cold before the century does.
What she won was not charity. It was the first payment this country’s own paper trail shows it agreeing to owe for slavery, granted in the same years it was writing its finest sentences about liberty, and honored about as faithfully as those sentences were.
Her name was Belinda Sutton.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
A new Sparks of Liberty story is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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