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Beyond Racial Capitalism
 Beyond Racial
Capitalism
Co-operatives in the African Diaspora

Edited by
CAROLINE SHENAZ HOSSEIN
SHARON D. WRIGHT AUSTIN
KEVIN EDMONDS
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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 To the people who braved the COVID-19 pandemic to stand up and speak out
against anti-Black racism while wearing their masks during the summer of 2020.
This was a collective movement where people who cared about ending anti-Black
racism came together to make sure their voices were heard. The global
co-operative sector should be taking notes on how to culturally diversify and to
start seeing informal Black co-operative systems of all kinds as part of the
co-operative identity and sector.
Foreword
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Beyond Racial Capitalism: Co-operatives in the African Diaspora, edited by Caroline

Shenaz Hossein, Sharon D. Wright Austin, and Kevin Edmonds for Oxford
University Press, brings together Black and racialized scholars who explore politi-
cal theorist Cedric Robinson’s conceptualization of “racial capitalism” in order to
bring it into studies of the Black social economy as lived and created through-
out the African diaspora. Contributors place the “Black radical tradition”, simply
described as “the refusal to accept life in captivity” and the force that wills us
to create maroonage spaces in conversation, with writings by exemplary femi-
nist political economists including Nina Banks, Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Jessica
Gordon-Nembhard, and H. L. T. Quan to demonstrate that the Black social economy
is essential to the Black radical tradition historically and conceptually. Contrib-
utors explain that fugitivity itself has relied on dimensions of Black co-operative
economics.
Co-operative thinking and practice enabled Black people to sabotage the coercive
nature of slavery itself and to weaken the market economy that followed in its “after-
life” and “second” life (Tomich 2003; Hartman 2007). Such cooperative thinking
prioritized affirming the self-determination and inherent humanity of those deemed
natural and inherent slaves. In the economic order of the Black social economy, coop-
eration performed an alchemy of social reality: turning bondspeople into free people,
turning plantations into sustainable small-scale food-independent communities, and
turning predatory credit and lending markets into member-owned financial unions.
White-led social, legal, juridical, electoral, educational, and economic institutions
engaged in legally protected conspiracies to extract and accumulate wealth and to
demand the tribute of relentless and agonizing forms of humiliation from generations
of enslaved and colonized persons and their descendants.
In the face of this onslaught, Black social economies used cooperation of a differ-
ent and higher ethical order to restore and recapture the human and economic value
that was being siphoned off from Black people—for the benefit of those very peo-
ple. Cooperative economics then used the socially constructed rules and regimens
around exchange, trade, and value to concretize Black rights and to establish bound-
aries around what could be stolen from Black people. Rather than focus on Black
belonging in the civic sphere, Black social economies invited Black people to affirm
their worth through the things that could belong to Black people. Economic indepen-
dence defined as owning land and growing food and cooperating was an essential part
of the toolkit for surviving and resisting the white will to make Black people into the
 Foreword vii

chattel property of others. The principles that guide cooperation in the Black social
economy have been relevant from slavery to the present because this decision to do
violence to Black value animates the only constant in the white libidinal economy.

Exclusion and Erasure

The contributors are concerned about the deliberate exclusion of Black and other
racialized people from histories of the cooperative movement (solidarity clubs, rotat-
ing savings and credit associations, mutual aid societies, informal groups well known
around the world in dozens of languages) and from formal financial, micro-credit,
and lending institutions. Both forms of exclusion—from knowledge production and
institutions— contribute to a mythology of whiteness and Europeanness as inher-
ently entrepreneurial, thrift-oriented, and focused on economic advancement and
individual wealth accumulation. Such fictitious “forger[ies] of memory,” to turn to
another Robinson (2007) concept used to define the porous and iterative nature
of racial regimes, is the cornerstone of grave injuries faced by Black and racialized
communities in North America. These injuries result in new forms of criminaliza-
tion of racialized newcomers that repeat the forms of criminalization that are the
institutional and ideological backbone of generations of slavery, post-slavery era
genocide, and land theft from Black and Indigenous farmers in the Old and New
World colonies—Ireland, Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Central
America.
Mapping cooperatives among racialized and colonized people is important
because enslaved persons and contemporary Black and racialized migrants are from
places where these social economic organizations are widespread and recognizable
as cornerstones of genuine (albeit marginalized and even criminalized) democracy-
sustaining economic transformation. Moreover, such documentation disabuses the
notion of “White Canada” which Canadian feminist cultural geographer Katherine
McKittrick (2006) has so carefully excavated. McKittrick’s Black Radical Tradition
historiography uses the demolition and erasure of Black place and space in Canada
as yet another example of the manufacture of white settler colonies which are alleged
to be destined for economic prosperity because they are populated by demographics
whitened by being allowed to do heinous and murderous genocide to Indigenous,
African descendant, and racialized populations. McKittrick (2006) illustrates exactly
the fashion through which these white settler colonies only become possible as demo-
cratic nations through disappearing Black and racialized persons who are building
and sustaining survival-focused social economies.
As explained in the Preface to this book, such white nationalist ideologies exist
through repressing historical accounts of the “risks that Black people take [and have
taken] to humanize [the] economy” while being stigmatized as agents of economic
undevelopment and financial failure. Further, these erasures create a mythological
white cooperative culture that results in caricatures of Black people as economically
viii Foreword

insignificant, incapable, and backward. Using Robinson’s method of a long historical

account of the economic life of the enslaved and their descendants from the Americas
and their descendants from postcolonial Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and
Southeast Asia marks yet another way in which super-development in the Global
North has been dependent on the people and ideas of the Global South.

Antique Legacies and Cultural Resources

Having framed the problem, the authors offer carefully rendered case studies that
demonstrate not just entrepreneurship but also a system of dynamic cultural val-
ues around what wealth is, what it is for, and how African-descended communities
define money and finance as collaborative social projects that “can produce resistant
and transformative approaches to society.” In Chapter 4, contributors Patricia Cam-
pos Medina, Erika Nava, and Sol Aramendi reveal that Black and Indigenous social
economies exist to create a sense of community that allows racialized migrants to
develop collective and pluri-vocal vocabularies for identifying the forms of economic
exclusion that they face, create alternative financial pathways, and make meaning
with the next generations so that they can create a base for challenging the extant
conditions.
Readers learn that “cooperative economic development for Black liberation is
not a new concept” (see Preface). As Robinson explains, Africans subjected to the
barracoons and Middle Passage were not “empty cargoes.” African and other racial-
ized people in the past and the present brought pro-social definitions of economic
life such as mutualism and collectivity with them. Braided into the semiotics of
greetings, gestures, naming practices, rites of passage, and ways of responding to
catastrophic environmental and public health disasters like imperialism in the past
and COVID-19 in the present were prophetic visions that resulted in distinctive
belief systems. According to Hossein, Edmonds, and Austin in the Introduction,
these belief systems include “being in community is essential to one’s life” and values
such as “trust, reciprocity, and self-help”. Such principles enabled making “consci-
entious decision[s] to opt for humane cooperative systems despite the hardships
they encounter[ed]” and required practical commitments to “decolonize economic
institutions and sites of organizations” (see Introduction).
The editors trace cultural resources to African antiquity and to notions of exchange
and trade as enriching participants in interactions instead of using usury, trick-
ery, or fraud to hoard value while reducing other people’s labor, skills, insights,
beliefs, or products to less than nothing. This produces “equitable work in the econ-
omy” and a social economy that is distinctive, that is resilient to global world crisis,
and that strives for ethical and moral high ground through disavowing dispos-
session, theft, enslavement, exploitation, extortion, and stealing the livelihoods of
the poor to benefit the rich and protected (see Preface). So while hostile readers
may recoil at the identitarian descriptions of these strategically deployed collective
 Foreword ix

cultural resources as “instinctive” and “ancestral” and “hereditary” the authors are
using culture to describe definitions of economic well-being that are durable and
long-lasting and which constitute ways of being and what Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí (2001)
called “worldsense.”
Beyond Racial Capitalism draws readers into the lived experiences of the founders
and sustainers of collectivist economic sociality and toward dynamic economic rela-
tions whose aim is the development of all instead of the protection and insulation
of those who benefit most from unregulated “invisible” anthropomorphized market
relations. In order to make such claims about alternative visions for what an econ-
omy exists for, authors must detail the myriad ways in which actual racialized people
have built such economic social relations in the face of erasure and enclosure. Each
case turns toward premodern, precolonial, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
macroeconomic questions about the nature of slavery, captivity, forced migration,
and the related mismanagement and manipulation of common global resources
that today still create extraordinary wealth for some and grinding poverty for
others.

Secrecy is Survival
Readers who are seeking liberatory potential and radical resistance in every social
phenomenon will make the mistake of attempting to generalize the promises of sur-
vival in the Black social economy to the rest of the world. I will admit to genuinely
wanting to see this text as a handbook for reconsidering the commons and break-
ing racial capitalism full stop. Amina Mama and Adotey Bing-Pappoe’s Chapter 5,
however, cautions against my own desire as a reader to generalize the Black social
economy. Mama and Bing-Pappoe describe how the social visions that animate the
Black social economy may not be transferable to people whose racialization history
has not been made by becoming the chattel human commodities of enslavement,
colonialism, and genocide.
Rather the Black social economy has contended against the universalizing tenden-
cies of racial capitalism through building purposefully internal and small communi-
ties of people who know and trust each other and who can exert social influence on
each other through their many shared roles and relationships. Thus, the contributors
are “going beyond” racial capitalism by visioning and practicing a different way to
organize economic and social life outside of and in antagonism to the racial capital-
ism that recreates slavery, second slavery, exclusion, marginalization, and devaluing
Black and racialized persons and communities in order to extract wealth and accu-
mulate value. The signature example of the necessity of trust and secrecy is the
Underground Railroad as an informal community of people most often unknown
to each other who engaged in criminalized civil disobedience.
By recognizing the sovereignty of fugitives determined to escape the monetary-
juridical regime of slavery, abolitionists among the free and enslaved (documented
x Foreword

and undocumented) “committed to democracy and share[d] decision-making.

Building consensus and practicing collective governance buil[t] cohesion” among the
contraband whose secrecy was a critical part of survival (Hossein et al., Introduction).
The risks they took together to escape were yet another Middle Passage, albeit one
in which the social economy that they built was not reliant on schemes that sim-
ply produced, farmed, and financed debt. These origins of a social economy require
inheriting practices of resistance and the will to retell stories of the origins of com-
mercial power in [the] theft of African people without guarantees that such testimony
or memory would guarantee freedom from new forms of violence, restitution, repa-
ration, or mainstream truth-telling about the racist routes of capitalist economic
exchange.
Though accused of being secretive, stigmatized as covers for illicit forms of crimi-
nalized exchange, and disregarded for being grounded in African cultural retentions
an oppressed people seek refuge and mobilize together because of their mutual
understanding of the hazards in society and the history of white sabotage. Secrecy,
maroonage, and fugitivity become the impetus for forms of survival and definitions
of selfhood/development/and group transformation that are: (1) steeped in Ubuntu,
(2) categorically antithetical to Eurocentric definitions of self/economic develop-
ment/and group transformation, and (3) not wedded to debt farming to mediate the
catastrophic effects of dislocation.

Building Futures in the Present

When participants in the Black social economy acknowledge and respond to enslave-
ment, land theft, and the global racial wealth divide with obligations to lift and
improve the conditions of entire peoples, we are witnessing a will to collectivize
on their own terms. Even the construction of this text that thinks racialized and
Indigenous migrants in the same frame as descendants of enslaved persons points
to collectivizing on their own terms—again following a distinctively Robinsonian
approach to political economy. Racialized migrants craft communal economic strate-
gies to survive oppressive economic conditions that are structured to incorporate
them into the most dangerous, poorly remunerated, legally unprotected, exploita-
tive and extraction-prone, and unhealthy parts of the essential workforce of the
wealthy parts of any society. Employers, neighbors, and civil sphere state functionar-
ies often implement institutionalized racialized immigration bias, linguistic racism,
and petty gendered xenophobia regardless of the employment status, education level,
or personal history of migrants.
The normative experience of racialized migrants is being subjected to discrimina-
tory financial and lending systems while also being baited about their responsibility
to integrate despite the many racial barriers. Nigerian immigrants turn to the age-
old Ajo system as a solution. Through Ajo, Nigerian immigrants gain access to bulk
finances to invest in different avenues—such as financial instruments, businesses,
 Foreword xi

and down payments for houses—that aid their incorporation (taken from Olawoye-
Mann’s Chapter 2).
Such baiting is not inconsequential as it forms the actual path to a broken and
damaged belonging evidenced in the long history of those African and Indigenous
people who have witnessed their citizenship rights in the Americas be paradig-
matically described in Dr. Martin Luther King’s (1963) heartbroken words as “a
bad check.” In Tatiana Benjamin and Sharon D. Wright Austin’s Chapter 3, they
note: “Even as Black women advance economically and socially, they are still facing
inadequate services that do not account for racial and gender disparities.” Further,
Benjamin and Austin find government and other state agencies have been created
to rectify histories of biased lending and prohibition of Black commercial enterprise
have taken up a color-blind ideology that props up and revises pre-Civil Rights Era
justifications for harming Black and racialized communities. This has resulted in the
discontinuation of policies to improve conditions for African Americans in favor of
the same meager economic interventions being spread across the many profound
needs by all racialized peoples.
Thus, agencies gather data that streamlines “efforts” that do not actually pull up
the roots of racial capitalism. Ultimately, the conditions that make defrauding Black
and racialized people through racial capitalism enable racial liberal progress instead
of fundamental change. The contributors are demanding a move “beyond racial
capitalism,” not simply accommodation with or minimal legal regulation of racial
capitalism. Rather than transforming the rules of the game, Benjamin and Austin
identify an institutionalized constraint that gaslights non-migrant people of color.
If these communities do not define their belonging solely and primarily through
championing the economic needs of racialized migrants, the domestic forms of dis-
criminatory and ultimately morally bankrupt lending and finance (for racialized
people) simply get extended to racialized migrants—whose migration was compelled
through the international variant of the same forms of blatantly discriminatory global
currency manipulation and financial speculation.
Among the many things that I find compelling about these contributions is that
they have carefully been curated to avoid the more obvious divide-and-conquer
rhetorics necessary to prop up white minority rule in the racially, ethnically, and
culturally diverse societies of the Americas and the Old World Colonies. Indeed,
by linking the histories of economic problem-solving and cooperative building in
migrant and non-migrant racialized communities, the contributors and editors have
stepped away from competing ethnic interests and the individualism that underwrite
those short-term political solutions, in favor of a nuanced and sophisticated account
of forms of anti-capitalist ethics. Beyond Racial Capitalism draws on the resources of
heritage including economic relations to build sustainable social ties toward a social
vision of economic and financial fugitivity for Indigenous, migrant, racialized, and
Black people.

Irvine, California
12 December 2022
xii Foreword

Works Cited

Atkins, K. 1993. The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African
Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900. London: Heinemann.
Benjamin, T. and Austin, S. D. W. Chapter 3, “The Black Social Economy: Black American
Women Using Susu and Co-operatives as Resistance.”
Bing-Pappoe, A. and A. Mama. Chapter 5, “Routes out of Racial Capitalism: Black Co-
operatives in the United States.”
Campos Medina, P., E. Nava, and S. Aramendi. Chapter 4, “Tandas and Co-operativas:
Understanding the Social Economy of Indigenous Mexican Immigrants Settled in
Perth Amboy, New Jersey and Staten Island, New York, U.S.A.”
Gordon Nembhard, J. 2014. Collective Courage: A History of African American Co-
operative Economic Thought. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Hartman, S. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York:
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Hossein, C. S. Chapter 1, “Black Canadian Co-operators and Countering Anti-Black
Racism.”
Kelley, R. 1992. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.
King Jr., M. L. 1963. “I have a dream” speech. Washington, DC, August 28.
McKittrick, K. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Olawoye-Mann, S. Chapter 2, “Beyond Coping: The Use of Ajo Culture among Nigerian
Immigrants to Counter Racial Capitalism in North America.”
Oyĕwùmí, O. 2001. “Translation of Cultures: Engendering Yoruba Language, Orature and
World Sense,” in Elizabeth Castelli (ed.), Women, Gender and Religion: A Reader. New
York: Palgrave.
Robinson, C. J. 2007. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in
American Theater and Film Before World War II. Raleigh: University of North Carolina
Press.
Robinson, C. J. 2021 [1983]. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,
3rd edn. Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press.
Tomich, D. 2003. “The ‘Second Slavery’: Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the
Nineteenth-Century World Economy,” in Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital,
and World Economy, 56–71. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Preface

Economic cooperation lies at the root of community building. Since March 2020,
people around the world have been grappling with the devastation of COVID-19
and they want to find new economies and ways of living. The pandemic has taken the
lives of millions of people and wreaked havoc on many businesses and livelihoods,
especially those of Black and racialized people. Through grassroots collectives and
cooperatives, Black people have kept their communities alive. While the rest of the
world professes a “rebirth of mutual aid,” cooperatives are not a new concept for the
African diaspora. Black and racialized citizens, especially newcomers, have always
been the targets of economic exclusion. As a result, cooperatives, of all types, have
been an effective way to counter racism in both business and the larger society.
Cooperative development for Black liberation is not a new concept. As long as
Black people have been exploited and oppressed in the global capitalist order, they
have had to figure out ways to bond and tap into an active form of social capital to
get things done. It is clear that cooperative development has always been an integral
part of the Black freedom movement. Some examples include the Haitian Revolu-
tion, the Underground Railroad and Maroon communities, and the proliferation of
Black cooperatives during the Great Depression, the Freedom Farm and other 1960s
cooperatives led by vanguard organizations like the Black Panthers. In Development
as Freedom, the Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen (2000) explained that
what people can achieve is deeply affected by the kinds of economic opportuni-
ties, political liberties, and social powers that exist. It is with this knowledge that
Black people living in the periphery chose to collaborate, come together, and build
economies out of sight. Thus, it is evident that cooperatives have always been used by
Black folks as a tool for liberation and collective determination.
In Beyond Racial Capitalism: Cooperatives in the African Diaspora, the authors
are mainly from African backgrounds, as well as Latin American and Indigenous
backgrounds. Each chapter examines the ways in which economic cooperation is
used to pursue equitable development. The book is inspired by principles outlined in
W. E. B. Du Bois’ text Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans (1907). In this
ground-breaking book, Du Bois discussed the importance of economic cooperation
for people of African descent. As our chapters will explain, the cooperatives that Black
and Indigenous people design and organize demonstrate the need for community
residents to know and trust each other.
In present day, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is a site of contestation.
Many individuals are aware of its role as an activist, civil, human, and political rights
movement. Yet, BLM is also an example of economic and social cooperation where
xiv Preface

people are cooperating for their very survival. Throughout the world, it encourages
people to further causes of concern to them by mutual aid, giving circles, and sup-
porting each other. In Canada, BLM started a mutual aid fund to support Black-led
community groups to advance their causes. Moreover, as of 2021, BLM has explicitly
supported cooperative development as part of its policy platform. Many cooperative
initiatives have emerged in recent years as a result of BLM organizing, including the
Black Church Food Security Network in Baltimore, Maryland, the Village Financial
Co-operative in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Black Lives Matter Housing Team
in Louisville, Kentucky.
The cooperative institutions of social and community capital often reside in alter-
native community economies, out of sight from the white, mainstream gaze. Their
informal nature is often demonized and viewed as illegal and inferior. Yet the infor-
mal domain is precisely where oppressed groups must seek refuge and mobilize
together to contest power. We remember the slaves who left the plantations for
the hills and later cooperated in informal spaces to flee from terror and bondage.
Today, we still see the vestiges of Maroons in the Quilombolas of Brazil, the Susus of
Trinidad, and the Kombits and Grwoupmans of Haiti. As W. E. B. Du Bois pointed
out in his 1907 book, Black people defined the Underground Railroad as a coop-
erative. It also was hidden because it was too dangerous to publicly move Black
people out of slavery. Economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard (2014) uncovered the
explanation of why Black farming cooperatives were often hidden from view, and it
was because they were viewed as subversive and threatening to the dominant white
powers.
This hidden cooperative history is one reason why the stories of the Black social
economy are a treasure trove of Black political economy strategies rooted in cul-
tural resources. Each of the editors of this book, Caroline Shenaz Hossein, Sharon
D. Wright Austin, and Kevin Edmonds, grew up in Black diasporic communities in
Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. Each one of them also has observed
that formal co-op organizing is one way that people resist the oppressions they endure
and they do it together. Oliver C. Cox (1959), a Caribbean sociologist who worked for
most of his life at Lincoln University in Missouri, was the first scholar to tie the world
system to a racist endeavour. His work was sidelined for a very long time because his
ideas were too “radical” to be accepted, and he argued that “neutral” development
theories were racist because they subjugate people based on their racial identity.
This book proposes a counter to that form of development. We examine Black
co-op organizers who intend to meet their own needs and also generally enhance
Black economic independence. As Robin D. G. Kelley (2002, 195) clarifies in Freedom
Dreams, “Black folks in the diaspora are surviving and creating in the ‘liberated zones’
of North America’s ghettos a co-operative world without wages or money.” Indeed,
the Black social economy is a way to envision, organize, and implement these Black
freedom dreams. Moreover, it is more than a practical immediate strategy, but is also
a revolutionary process to replace the contradictions of our current everyday reality
with our wildest collective dreams of Black liberation.
 Preface xv

Most mainstream political economy theories do not acknowledge the risks Black
people take trying to humanize the economy and society through cooperatives.
Because European Marxist theory was not internationalized (Johnson and Lubin
2017), it could not account for experiences on the African continent. Cedric Robin-
son (1983) made it clear that white Marxists have not been able to adequately explain
the total impact of racism and racial regimes. Erica Edwards (2017, 252) argues
that “Cedric People” have continued his legacy of critiquing Western civilization
and articulating the “other world-building that is necessary for the survival of Black
thought and Black being.” In this edited book, each author is one of the “Cedric Peo-
ple”. In this role, they explain the manner in which Black people are working together
for their collective well-being.
Black citizens, living outside Africa, have had to rethink mainstream economics—
as well as the accepted alternatives—in ways to protect and uplift their own com-
munities. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2020) has shown in her work As We
Have Always Done that capitalism and its extraction has been vested in individu-
alism and competition that run contrary to the community well-being, unity and
cooperation of the Nishnaabeg people. Political scientist Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
(2015), also one of the “Cedric People,” explains that major foundations pay for
the knowledge informing what we understand Black suffering to be, and that shar-
ing alternatives countering this controlled understanding is actively suppressed.
She calls this the project of global whiteness.1 This book explains Black people’s
investment in economic cooperation despite global whiteness and the hegemonic
culture of capitalism. Black organizing requires the thoughtful sharing and pooling
of resources to ensure people can achieve their goals. It also values collective well-
being over individualism, and directly challenges a capitalist ideology. Therefore, the
Black organizing efforts that we discuss in each chapter allow racially marginalized
people to build their community with agency and collective determination below
the radar.
We utilize the Black social economy framework in our analyses because it is about
collective and politicized action for people of African descent. Rooted in Black fem-
inist theory, it draws on the plethora of work on the political economy written by
Black scholars who understand the double bind of being Black and female when
it comes to organizing for liberation. Intersectionality is a term that characterizes
the dual oppression Black women encounter because of their race and gender. Each
author discusses Black life and struggle, lived experience, and capitalist economies in
a specific cultural context. The Black social economy provides a better understand-
ing of how cooperatives take hold in environments of racial capitalism. It is rooted
in intersectionality and lived experience because Black women lead the collabora-
tive efforts in many of these communities. Most have been persecuted because of the
race, gender, and class. However, as we will explain, they persevere because of their
quest for better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities. Telling

1 See Erica Edward’s chapter “Cedric People” in Johnson and Lubin (2017).
xvi Preface

these stories is often risky for scholars because those in power prefer that these cases
of knowledge-making languish in obscurity.

1. These nine cases argue that Black people in the diaspora have developed var-
ious economic alternatives in communities plagued by racial capitalism. The
cases explain various Black social economy efforts in eleven countries that
are in the Black diaspora, but are outside Africa, including the United States,
Canada, St. Vincent, Haiti, Grenada, Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana, St. Lucia, Ire-
land, and Brazil. The cooperatives, and especially those in the informal arenas,
all emphasize commoning of goods, mutual aid, and self-help.
2. By collectively organizing their community members, these activists prove that
alternatives do exist and always have. Black cooperatives allow individuals who
are excluded from the mainstream to lead their own economic systems. This
is why these stories need to be acknowledged. Otherwise, we miss the chance
to draw on the experience of groups doing this kind of equitable work within
economies. Black people and especially women were engaging in cooperatives
long before the terms of “access,” “inclusion,” and “equity” became a focus
in some societies. These cases mentioned in each chapter provide additional
information about Black cooperativism and about the many contributions of
marginalized people in the African diaspora.

This collective work is about “rethinking racial capitalism” and shows that in the
dehumanization of Black people through an extreme variant of the capitalist system,
some people will create their own systems that make them free and happy (Bhat-
tacharyya 2018). While many books on cooperatives exist, they exclude the Black
diaspora cooperative experience. The International Co-operative Alliance defines
cooperatives as voluntary and member-owned institutions where people decide
democratically how to run business. The cooperative sector is guided by a set of prin-
ciples similar to those used by Black folks who choose solidarity economies and are
fighting for equity. However, the formal cooperative alliance has no dedicated seat of
representation for the African diaspora.
Pivoting to Black resistance and resilience in the form of cooperation to Black
social economy is how Black people live in places with business exclusion, wealth
disparities, and anti-Black violence. We can only infer that this exclusion is designed
to ignore the way that deeply traumatized groups use cooperatives to transform social
and economic systems. By drawing on Robinson’s (1983) contributions in Black
Marxism and on the Black social economy framework, we seek to fundamentally
upend the white normative narrative of cooperatives, situate Black cooperative prac-
tice within the Black radical tradition, and focus on the praxis of Black cooperators.
We hope that in this work of transgressing against those who want to secure authority
that we are liberating the minds of those who want to imagine a new world (Spivak
2000; hooks 2003). We want to arrive at a place of togetherness where we can finally
“see” each other.
 Preface xvii

Black people in the African diaspora have imagined and sought to model various
alternatives to the development programs that racial capitalism underwrites. The data
and narratives of Black social economy are a counter distinction, if not the negation,
of racial capitalism. In conclusion, this book emphasizes Black resistance, resilience,
and empowerment. Community residents use the Black social economy as the anti-
dote for living in the midst of extreme wealth inequalities and anti-Black violence.
In the Black social economy, policitized actions occur in order to bring about equity
and inclusion. The cooperators in each chapter are willing to come together because
of their common interests in transforming their economies and fighting for social
change.
Caroline Shenaz Hossein, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada
Sharon D. Wright Austin, University of Florida, U.S.
Kevin Edmonds, University of Toronto, Canada

Works Cited

Betasamosake Simpson, L. 2020. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through

Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Bhattacharyya, G. 2018. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and
Survival. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Cox, O. C. 1959. The Foundations of Capitalism. New York: Philosophical Library Inc.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1907. Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans. Altanta, GA:
Atlanta University Press.
Edwards, E. 2017. “Cedric People,” In Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (eds.),
Futures of Black Radicalism, 251–254. Brooklyn: Verso.
Gordon Nembhard, J. 2014. Collective Courage: A History of African American Co-
operative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park: Pennsylvania University
Press.
hooks, b. 2003. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, G. T. and A. Lubin. 2017. Futures of Black Radicalism. Brooklyn: Verso.
Kelley, R. D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Robinson, C. J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd edn.
London: Zed Press.
Robinson, C. J. 2019. Cedric Robinson: On Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and
Cultures of Resistance, edited by H. L. T. Quan. London: Pluto Books.
Sen, A. 2000. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor Books.
Spivak, G. C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds.),
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Willoughby-Herard, T. 2015. Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the
Racial Logic of White Vulnerability. Oakland: University of California.
Acknowledgments

We are humbled by the work of the African diaspora to build cooperative systems
despite the immense hardships they endure. We thank each contributor in this book
for daring to write a case about the Black and racialized experience in cooperative
economics when we know that it is not easy work to do. And for sticking through
this project during a difficult period. We all weathered a global pandemic, and this
project has been delayed many times as a result of it. In this period of lockdown, we
took the time to rewrite the cases in light of new times.
We thank our loved ones for all the time they have given us to write with the
hope that this work will become a part of the canon in the field of political econ-
omy. We would like to thank the research assistants: Megan Pearson, Jane Lumumba,
Semhar Berhe, and Katherine Earnshaw at York University; James Patriquin from
Carleton University’s Department of Political Science in Ottawa; and Rachel Rosen,
Rodney Womack, and Miryam Elshaer from the University of Florida Political Sci-
ence Department’s Junior Fellows Program for their dedication related to the Black
Social Economy project.
We would like to thank the following scholars for their support in the intellectual
shaping of this work—Professors Faye V. Harrison, Fantu Cheru, Jessica Gordon
Nembhard, Curtis Haynes Jr., Beverley Mullings, Lisa Aubrey, and John Rapley—
as well as the pioneers of Black politics—James Jennings, Mack Jones, Minion K. C.
Morrison, Jewel Limar Prestage, Dianne Pinderhughes, William E. Nelson Jr., Wilbur
Rich, and Hanes Walton Jr. A special note of gratitude to Professor Christabell PJ of
Kerala University and head of the DISE Collective in Kerala, who made extensive
comments on this book because she believes in this project. We are humbled by the
vote of confidence from our colleagues in the National Conference of Black Polit-
ical Scientists (NCOBPS) and the Black Research Network (BRN) at University of
Toronto.
The funds from the Canada Research Chair and Government of Ontario’s Early
Researcher Award supported this project, with the hiring of RAs, book cover, attend-
ing conferences, and editing costs. The University of Toronto also covered some of the
editing expenses. We are grateful for the feedback on our chapters and points made
on racial capitalism by Joshua Myers at Howard University. Rene Hatcher at the Mar-
shall Law School also provided many useful edits on an early draft of this manuscript.
Artist Chelsea Heard captured the meaning of this book in a beautiful cover. We are
thankful to Colette Stoeber for giving her time to proofread this manuscript.
Our editor Adam Swallow believed in this book when many others did not. We
admire his dedication to making transparent the processes that help to diversify
what knowledge gets produced at Oxford University Press. We are grateful for the
 Acknowledgments xix

guidance of Ryan Morris, our editor, who assisted us well and Sandhiya Babu who
carried us through the production process. A big thank you goes to Charles Lauder
for your careful copy editing. We will never know the delegates, many editing assis-
tants, and the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions improved this project.
We are humbled by all of the work you do. Blessings.
Another random document with
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 CHAPTER XIV
HOW THE MAN OF SENTIMENT
SENTIMENTALISED IN A DITCH

He was not to remain long undisturbed, it seemed, for presently

upon the stilly air was the faint, regular tapping of a stick that drew
gradually nearer, and glancing up he saw an old woman
approaching, one who trudged sturdily with the aid of a formidable
staff and bore a large wooden basket on her arm; a tall old creature
with a great jut of nose and chin and fierce bright eyes that glittered
beneath thick brows, whose jetty-black contrasted very strangely
with her snow-white hair. But just now these fierce old eyes were
dimmed with tears, and more than once she sniffed loud and
dolorously; perceiving which and noting how she laboured with the
heavy-laden basket, Sir John pocketed his tablets and rose. But,
quite lost in her grief, the old creature paused to sob and sniff and
wipe away her tears with a corner of her shawl, in the doing of which
she let fall her basket, scattering its contents broadcast in the dust.
At this calamity she wailed distressfully, and was in the act of
bending her old joints to collect her property when she was aware of
one who did this for her, a slender, very nimble young man, at sight
of whom she forgot her troubles a while, watching him in mute
surprise, yet quick to heed the white delicacy of these hands as they
darted here and there collecting the bundles of herbs and simples
with the other more homely vegetables that lay so widely scattered.
Thus Sir John, happening to glance up as he stooped for a large
cabbage, met the fixed scrutiny of a pair of black eyes, so fierce and
keenly direct beneath their jutting brows that he stared back,
surprised and a little disconcerted.
“My good dame, why d’ye stare so?” he questioned.
 “I dream, young sir! Your bright eyes do ha’ set me a-dreamin’ o’
other days ... better days ... when the world was younger ... an’
kinder. Old I be an’ tur’ble lonesome, but I ha’ my dreams ... ’tis arl
the years ha’ left me.... But why must ye meddle wi’ the likes o’ me?”
... she demanded in sudden ferocity. “Why don’t ’ee cross y’r fingers
or mak’ ‘the horns’ agin me?”
“Why should I?” he inquired, wondering.
“Because they du say as I’ve the ‘evil eye’ an’ can blight a man wi’
a look as easy as I can a pig ... or a cow.”
“To be sure your eyes are very strange and bright,” he answered
gently, “and must have been very beautiful once, like yourself—when
the world was younger.”
“Beautiful,” she repeated in changed tone; and her eyes grew less
keen, the harsh lines of her fierce, old face softening wonderfully.
“Beautiful?” said she again. “Aye, so I was, years agone ... though
there be few as would believe it o’ me now an’ fewer eyes sharp
enough t’ see.... An’ you bean’t fruttened o’ me then, young man?”
“No, I am not frightened,” answered Sir John.
“Why then,” quoth she, “when you’m done wi’ that cabbage o’
mine, there be an onion over yonder, agin the dik!” Sir John
deposited the cabbage, and having retrieved the errant onion, added
this also to the well-laden basket.
“That is all, I think?” said he, glancing about.
“Aye!” she nodded. “An’ it be plain t’ know you be a stranger
hereabouts. There bean’t a man nor bye, aye, an’ mortal few o’ the
women, would ha’ stooped to du so much for poor old Penelope
Haryott, I reckon.”
“And pray why not?”
“Because they say I be a witch, an’ they be arl main fruttened o’
me, an’ them as say they ain’t, du hate me most. Aye, me! I’ve been
thrattened wi’ the fire afore now; an’ only las’ March, an’ main cold it
were, they was for a-duckin’ o’ me in the Cuckmere.... Ah, an’ they’d
ha’ done it tu if Passon Hartop ’adn’t galloped over tu Alfriston an’
fetched Sir Hector MacLean as knew me years ago, an’ Jarge Potter
as I’ve dandled a babe on my knee. Sir Hector were main fierce
again the crowd an’ swore t’ cut any man’s throat as dared tetch me,
an’ Jarge Potter ’ad on his old frieze coat—so the crowd let me go ...
they ain’t tried to harm me since.... But ’tis very sure you be a
stranger in these parts, young man.”
“Indeed, yes!” sighed Sir John, once more oppressed by the sense
of his responsibility and of the duties left undone.
“An’ yet there be a look about ’ee, young man, as do whisper me
you was barn here in Sussex an’ not s’ fur away, I reckon.”
“Oh ... begad!” he exclaimed, starting. “What should make you
think so, pray?”
“Y’r hands, young sir, the high cock o’ your chin, y’r pretty eyes ...
they do mind me of other eyes as looked into mine ... long afore you
was barn ... when the world was happier.... Though ’e were bigger’n
you, young man ... so tall an’ noble-lookin’! Alack, ’twas long ago an’
the world be changed for the worse since then—’specially High
Dering! Aye, me! I’ll be a-goin’, young sir, thankin’ ye for your
kindness to a solitary old woman.”
“How far are you going?” he questioned.
“Only to the village yonder.”
“This basket is much too heavy for you.”
“Lud, young master, I do be stronger than I look!” she answered,
with a mirthless laugh. “Aye, tur’ble strong I be or I should ha’ died
years agone, I reckon. So doan’t ’ee trouble, sir ... besides, folk ’ud
stare t’ see s’fine a young man along o’ me, an’ a-carryin’ my old trug
an’ arl ... so let be!”
Sir John smiled, took up the basket, reached his stick whence it
leaned against the stile and set off with old Penelope Haryott, suiting
his pace to hers and talking with such blithe ease that old Penelope,
forgetting her rustic pride at last, talked in her turn, as she might
have done “when the world was younger and better.”
 “Ah yes, I mind Sir Hector years agone, when he were jest Mr.
Hector an’ friend t’ Sir John Dering—him as was the ‘real’ Sir John
as lived at ‘the gert house’ yonder an’ married here ... an’ marched
away t’ the wars wi’ Mr. Hector, both s’fine in their red coats, and him
s’handsome an’ gay ... him as was killed an’ never come marchin’
back.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Sir John as she paused. “So you knew Sir John
Dering, the Sir John who was killed years ago in Flanders? Pray tell
me of him.”
“An’ why should I?” quoth the old woman in sudden anger. “He’s
been dead long years an’ forgot, I reckon. But when he lived the
world was a better place ... ’specially High Dering! Aye, he was ... a
man!”
“And what,” questioned Sir John wistfully, “what of the new Sir
John Dering?”
Old Penelope spat contemptuously and trudged on a little faster.
“Take care o’ my old trug, young man,” she admonished; “the
’andle be main loose! Aye, me, if my troubles was no ’eavier than
that theer trug I’d bear’em j’yful!”
“Are you so greatly troubled, then?” he asked gently.
“Ah, more’n my share, I reckon! And an old woman so solitary as I
be must allus go full o’ sorrow!”
“Will you tell me some of your sorrows, old Penelope?”
“Why should I?”
“Because I ask reverently and respect you.”
“Respect! Me?” she muttered. “Respect? O kind Lord, ’tis a
strange word in my old ears! Folks mostly curse me ... the children
throws stones at me! ’Tis an ill thing to be named a witch ... an’ all
because I can see deeper and further than most fules, can read the
good an’ evil in faces an’ know a sight about yarbs an’ simples. An’
they’re fruttened o’ me, the fules ... ah, an’ they need be, some on
’em—’specially one!”
 “You were weeping when I saw you first, Penelope; yet tears do
not come easily with you, I judge.”
“Tears?” she exclaimed fiercely. “An’ yet I’ve shed s’ many ’tis gert
wonder there be any left. ’Tis wonnerful how much one woman can
weep in one lifetime, I reckon.”
“And why did you weep to-day?”
“’Tidn’t no manner o’ business o’ yourn, young man!” she
exclaimed bitterly.
“Why, then, pray forgive me!” he answered, with a little bow; at this
she stared and immediately spoke in changed voice.
“I wep’, sir, because this day week I’m to be turned out o’ doors wi’
never a roof to shelter me—unless some o’ the neighbours offers—
which they won’t ... Lord, tak’ care o’ the trug, young man, if ye swing
it so fierce ’twill go to pieces!”
“Why are you being turned out?”
“Because they be arl fruttened o’ me—an’ him most of arl——”
“Whom do you mean by ‘him’?”
But old Penelope tramped on unheeding, only she muttered to
herself fiercely.
“Do you dread the future so greatly, Penelope?”
“No!” she answered sturdily. “I bean’t fruttened o’ now’t but fire ...
an’ dogs!”
“Dogs?” he questioned.
“Aye, young man, they du set ’em on me sometimes, ’tis why I
carry this gert staff ... killed a dog wi’ it once, I did—though I were
badly bit! So they clapped me in the stocks, the dog was valleyble, y’
see, an’ chanced to belong to Lord Sayle, him as du live at the great
’ouse ’Friston way.”
Talking thus, they became aware of leisured hoof-strokes behind
them, and, turning to stare, old Penelope pointed suddenly at the
approaching rider with her long staff.
 “Yonder ’e comes!” she whispered fiercely; “him as ought t’ be
dead an’ gibbeted ... him as be afeart o’ me!”
Glancing round in turn, Sir John beheld a man bestriding a large,
plump steed, a man who rode at a hand-pace, apparently lost in
thought; thus Sir John had full time to observe him narrowly as he
approached.
He seemed a prosperous and highly respectable man, for he went
in broadcloth and fine linen; but his garments, devoid of all
embellishings, were of sober hue, so that, looked at from behind, he
might have been an itinerant preacher with a hint of the Quaker, but
seen from in front, the narrow eyes, predatory nose, vulperine mouth
and fleshy chin stamped him as being like nothing in life but himself.
Slowly he approached, until, suddenly espying the old woman, he
urged his somnolent horse to quicker gait and rode towards her,
brandishing the stick he carried.
“Damned hag,” cried he, “you ought to burn!”
“Dirty twoad,” she retorted, “you’d ought to hang!” At this, the man
struck at her passionately, and, being out of reach, spurred his
powerful horse as if to ride her down; but Sir John, setting by the
basket, sprang and caught the bridle.
“Steady, sir, steady!” quoth he mildly.
“Mind your own business!” cried the horseman.
“Faith, sir,” answered Sir John ruefully, “’tis high time I did, ’twould
seem. And indeed I propose doing so, but in my own fashion. And
first I desire to learn why you ride the king’s highway to the common
danger——”
“Oh, and who the devil might you be?”
“One who hath played divers rôles, sir,” answered Sir John. “Just
at present I find myself a Man o’ Sentiment, full o’ loving-kindness,
especially to sorrowful old age——”
“What the devil!” exclaimed the horseman, staring.
 “Come then, sir, let us together bare our heads in homage to Age,
Sorrow and Womanhood in the person of this much-enduring
Mistress Haryott!” and off came Sir John’s hat forthwith.
“Are ye mad?” demanded the other scornfully. “Are ye mad or
drunk, my lad?”
“Sir, a Man of Sentiment is never——”
“Curse your sentiment! Let me warn ye that yon hag is a notorious
evil-liver and a damned witch——”
“Which as a Man of Sentiment——”
“Hold y’r tongue, d’ye hear! She’s a witch, I tell ye, so tak’ my
advice, my lad, throw that old trug o’ her’n over the hedge and leave
her to the devil! And now loose my bridle; I’m done.”
“But I am not, sir!” answered Sir John. “You attempted to strike a
woman in my presence, and have dared allude to me twice as your
‘lad’—two very heinous offences——”
“Loose my bridle or ’twill be the worse for ye. D’ye know who I
am?”
“Judging by your right eye, sir, its rainbow colouring, I opine you
must be Mr. James Sturton——”
“Damn your insolence—leggo my bridle!”
But instead of complying, Sir John gave a sudden twist to the bit,
whereupon the plump and somnolent steed waked to sudden action,
insomuch that Mr. Sturton was nearly unseated and his hat tumbled
off; whereupon Sir John deftly skewered it upon the end of his stick
and tossed it over the hedge; and old Penelope, watching its brief
flight, uttered a single screech of laughter and was immediately silent
again.
Mr. Sturton, having quieted his horse, raised his stick and struck
viciously, but Sir John, deftly parrying the blow, answered it with a
thrust, a lightning riposte that took his aggressor full upon fleshy
chin. Mr. Sturton dropped his stick, clapped hand to chin and, seeing
his own blood, spurred madly upon Sir John, who, in escaping the
lashing hoofs, tripped and fell into the ditch.
“Let that learn ye!” cried Mr. Sturton, exultantly shaking his fist. “A
ditch is the proper place for you, my lad.... I only hope as you’ve
broke a bone.”
“Thank you,” answered Sir John, sitting up, and groping for his hat,
“I find myself very well, for:

Though in posture unheroic

You behold me still a stoic.
And, further, here’s a truth, sir, which is:
There are places worse than ditches!

Indeed, Mr. Sturton,” he added, leaning back in the ditch and folding
his arms, “’tis in my mind that you may find yourself yearning
passionately for a good, dry ditch one o’ these days.”
“Bah!” cried the other contemptuously. “If ye can crawl—crawl and
bring me my hat.”
“The heavens,” answered Sir John, pointing thither with graceful
flourish, “the heavens shall fall first, sir.”
“Ha, now—look’ee! You’ll bring me my hat, young man, or I’ll
march you and yon vile old beldam into Dering and ha’ ye clapped
into the stocks together for assault on the highway! D’ye hear?”
“Sir,” answered Sir John, “a fiddlestick!”
Uttering an angry exclamation, Mr. Sturton whipped a pistol from
his holster, but as he did so, old Penelope whirled her long staff
which, missing him by a fraction, took effect upon his horse,
whereupon this much-enduring animal promptly bolted and galloped
furiously away with Mr. Sturton in a cloud of dust.
“Lord ha’ mercy!” gasped old Penelope as the galloping hoof-beats
blurred and died away. “Lord, what ’ave I done?”
“Removed an offence by a mere flourish o’ your magic wand, like
the fairy godmother you are!” answered Sir John. “Mistress
Penelope, accept my thanks—I salute you!” And, standing up in the
ditch, he bowed gravely.
“Ha’ done, young man, ha’ done!” she cried distressfully. “He’ll
raise the village again’ me ... he’ll ha’ me in the stocks again—an’ arl
along o’ you! An’ I can’t bear they stocks like I used to ... they
cramps my old bones s’cruel.... O Lord ha’ mercy! The stocks!” And,
leaning on her staff, she bowed her white head and sobbed
miserably.
In a moment Sir John was out of the ditch and, standing beside
her, laid one white hand upon her shoulder, patting it gently.
“Penelope,” said he softly, “don’t weep! No man shall do you
violence.... I swear none shall harm you any more ... so be
comforted!”
“An’ who be you t’ promise s’much?” she demanded fiercely.
“One who will keep his word——”
“I be so old,” she wailed—“so old an’ lonesome an’ weary of ’t all.”
“But very courageous!” he added gently. “And I think, Penelope,
nay, I’m sure there are better days coming for you—and me. So
come, let us go on, confident in ourselves and the future.”
And taking stick and basket in one hand, he slipped the other
within his aged companion’s arm and they tramped on again.
“You speak mighty bold, young man!” said she after a while, with
another of her keen glances. “Aye, an’ look mighty bold—why?”
“Perhaps because I feel mighty bold!” he answered lightly.
“Aye, like ye did when he knocked ye into the ditch, young man!”
“The ditch?” repeated Sir John. “Aye, begad, the ditch! ’S heart, it
needed but this!” And here he laughed so blithely that old Penelope
stared and, forgetting her recent tears, presently smiled.
“Ye tumbled so ’mazin’ sudden, young man,” she nodded. “An’
then I never ’eerd no one talk po’try in a dik’ afore.”
 “And you probably never will again, Penelope. The occasion was
unique and my extempore rhymes none too bad.”
“Eh—eh, young man, did ye mak’ ’em up ... a-settin’ in t’ dik’ ... arl
out o’ y’r head? Lord!”
So they reached the village at last, its deep-thatched cottages
nestled beneath the sheltering down; a quiet, sleepy place where a
brook gurgled pleasantly and rooks cawed lazily amid lofty, ancient
trees; a place of peace, it seemed, very remote from the world.
But, as they went, rose a stir, a flutter, a growing bustle; heads
peered from casements, from open doorways and dim interiors;
children ceased their play to point, a woman laughed shrilly, men,
home-coming from the fields, stood to stare, to laugh, to hoot and
jeer; and foremost, among a group of loungers before the ancient
inn, Sir John espied Mr. Sturton.
And thus amid hoots, jeers and derisive laughter came Sir John to
High Dering.
 CHAPTER XV
WHICH INTRODUCES A FRIEZE COAT AND ITS
WEARER, ONE GEORGE POTTER

“Old gammer du ha’ found ’ersen a man at last!” cried a voice.

“Ah, the danged owd witch du ha’ ’witched hersel’ a sweet’eart fur
sure!” roared another.
“An’ sech a nice-lookin’ young man an’ arl!” quoth a matron with a
fat baby in her arms, whom Sir John saluted with a bow, whereupon
she hid blushing face behind her plump baby.
But as they progressed the crowd grew and, with increasing
number, their attitude waxed more threatening; laughter changed to
angry mutterings, clods and stones began to fly.
“I waarned ’ee ’ow ’twould be!” quoth old Penelope bitterly. “You’d
best leave me an’ run, young man, quick—up the twitten yonder!”
Even as she spoke, Sir John was staggered by a well-aimed clod
and his hat spun from his head. Setting down the basket, he turned
and stood fronting the crowd frowning a little, chin uptilted, serene of
eye. Foremost among their assailants was a burly young fellow,
chiefly remarkable for a very wide mouth and narrow-set eyes,
towards whom Sir John pointed with his holly-stick.
“Pray, Mistress Haryott,” he inquired in his clear, ringing tones,
“who is yonder ill-conditioned wight?”
“That?” cried old Penelope in fierce scorn. “It be Tom Simpson, a
Lon’on lad ... one o’ th’ Excise as creeps an’ crawls an’ spies on
better men——”
“Oh, do I, then!” snarled the burly young man. “I’ll knock your
dummed eye out for that, I will!” And he reached for a stone, but
checked suddenly as Sir John strode towards him carrying the holly-
stick much as if it had been a small-sword.
“Talking of eyes,” quoth Sir John, with a graceful flourish of the
stick, “drop that stone, lest I feel it necessary to blind you!” and he
made an airy pass at the face of the young man, who leapt back so
precipitately that he stumbled and fell, whereupon the crowd, roaring
with laughter at his discomfiture, pressed nearer, eager for diversion.
“Doan’t let ’un bloind ’ee, lad!” cried one.
“’E bean’t so big as ’ee, Tom! Tak’ a ’edge-stake tu un!”
“Noa, tak’ my ol’ bat; it du be a good ’eavy ’un, Tom!” cried a
second.
The burly young man, finding himself thus the centre of
observation, snatched the proffered stick, squared his shoulders and
approached Sir John in very ferocious and determined manner, but
halted, just out of reach, to spit upon his palm and take fresh hold
upon his bludgeon; whereupon the crowd encouraged him on this
wise:
“Knock ’is little wig off, Tom!”
“Poke ’is eye out, lad!”
“Aim at ’is nob!”
“Go fur ’is legs!”
Suddenly the burly young man sprang, aiming a terrific blow, but,
instead of attempting a parry, Sir John leapt nimbly aside, and the
young man, impelled by the force of his stroke, once more stumbled
and fell; and then before he could rise, old Penelope commenced to
belabour him with her long staff as he lay, panting out maledictions
with every blow until the crowd, laughing, shouting, cursing, surged
forward to the rescue. Drawing the fierce and breathless old creature
behind him, Sir John, seeing escape impossible, faced the oncoming
menace strung and quivering for desperate action, while the crowd
lashed itself to fury by such cries as:
“Down wi’ the young cock!”
 “Scrag the owd witch, lads: to the watter wi’ ’er!”
“Aye, to the river with ’em—both of ’em!” cried Mr. Sturton, loudest
of all.
And then forth from one of those narrow lanes, or rather passages
that are known as “twittens,” sauntered a man in a short, frieze coat,
vast of pocket and button, a wide-shouldered, comely man whose
face, framed between neatly trimmed whiskers, wore an air of
guileless good-nature. Guilelessness indeed! It was in his eyes
despite their lurking twinkle, in the uptrend of his firm lips, the tilt of
his nose, his close-cropped whiskers and square chin. Guilelessness
beamed in the brass buttons of his short-skirted frieze coat, it was in
the very creases of his garments, it seemed to enfold him from boots
and gaiters to the crown of his weather-worn hat, it was in the tones
of his soft yet resonant voice when he spoke:
“Lor’ love Potter, Mr. Sturton, sir, but ’oo’s been an’ give ye that
theer tur’ble eye? Arl black it be, sir, leastways where it bean’t black
’tis green. An’ swole, sir! Lor’ love George Potter’s limbs, it du be a-
swellin’ an’ a-puffin’ of itself up that proud, sir! ’Tis most alarmin’, Mr.
Sturton! Shame on ye, neighbours; can’t none on ye du nothin’ fur
poor Mr. Sturton’s ogle—look at ’ee——” But, uttering a fierce
imprecation, Mr. Sturton turned his back, pushed his way angrily into
the inn, and slammed the door behind him.
“I never seen a blacker eye, never——”
“Don’t go fur to blame we, Jarge Potter!” quoth a greybeard.
“’Tidn’t none o’ our doin’—no!”
“Then what be the trouble, neighbours? What’s to du, good folk?”
inquired Mr. Potter.
“It ain’t none o’ your business anyway!” retorted the burly young
man sullenly. “We be honest folks, which be more than some can
say with y’r poachin’, ah, an’ smugglin’!”
“Hold thy tongue, lad!” cried the greybeard, plucking the burly
young man’s arm. “Don’t ’ee see as Jarge be wearin’ ’is ol’ frieze
coat?”
 “What do I care for ’is old coat!”
“That’s because ye be fullish an’ strange ’ereabouts an’ doan’t
know Jarge.”
“Neighbours,” said Mr. Potter in his deep, leisured tones, his placid
gaze roving from face to face, “you arl do know as Potter be a
peaceable man, so here’s Potter a-beggin’ an’ a-pleadin’ o’ ye to
leave old Pen alone—or I’m afeard some on ye might get ’urted—
bad, I reckon!” As he spoke, Mr. Potter’s powerful hands
disappeared into the deep pockets of his frieze coat, and he took a
leisurely pace forward. “Simpson, my lad,” quoth he, nodding kindly
at the burly young man, “your mouth’s so oncommon large as you’ll
swaller yourself, boots an’ arl, one of these days if ye open it s’wide!
So run along, my lad! ’Ome be the word, neighbours; off wi’ ye now
—arl on ye. I bean’t a-goin’ t’ plead twice wi’ no one.”
Mr. Potter’s brow was smooth, guilelessness seemed to radiate
and beam from his person, but, seeing how the crowd forthwith
scattered and melted away, the burly young man betook himself off
likewise, muttering darkly.
Then Mr. Potter turned in his unhurried fashion to look at Sir John,
and the smile that lurked in the corners of his mouth slowly
broadened.
“Young sir,” said he, touching his hat, “who you be or what, bean’t
no consarn o’ mine nohow, but, sir, you stood up for a old ’ooman as
aren’t got many to tak’ ’er part, d’ye see, an’ so ’ere’s Potter a-
thankin’ of you—an’ that is my business, I rackon.”
“Indeed, Mr. Potter, ’twould seem I have to thank you also, you—or
your coat——”
“Coat?” repeated Mr. Potter, glancing down at the garment in
question as if mildly surprised to behold it. “Aye, to be sure—’tis a
old jacket as I use in my trade, d’ye see——”
“A free-trade, I think?” added Sir John.
“Lor’ love ’ee, sir,” sighed Mr. Potter, opening his guileless eyes a
trifle wider, “doan’t ’ee tak’ no ’eed o’ what that theer young Simpson
says——”
“Mr. Potter,” quoth Sir John, smiling, “a week ago I was shaking
hands with Captain Sharkie Nye aboard the True Believer, and I
should like to shake yours.”
“What, be you the young gen’leman as crossed wi’ Sir Hector?”
“That same. And my name is Derwent.”
“Why, Mr. Derwent, sir, that du alter the case, I rackon. So theer be
Potter’s ’and, sir, and heartily! Ah, an’ yonder be old Penelope a-
beckonin’ ... her will curse we shameful if us du keep her waitin’ ... so
come ’long, sir.”
“Aye, come y’r ways, du—both on ye!” cried the old creature
imperiously. “’Tidn’t often I ’as comp’ny, so I’ll brew ye a dish o’ tay
——”
“Tea?” exclaimed Sir John.
“Aye, all the way from Chaney, young man! Tay as costes forty
shillin’ a pound an’ more up to Lunnon—tak’ care o’ my old trug! This
way—down twitten!”
She led them down a narrow way between the walls of cottages
and gardens, and at last to a very small cottage indeed, a forlorn
little structure, its garden trampled, its broken window-panes stuffed
with old rags to exclude the elements, itself all dilapidation from
rotting thatch to crumbling doorstep.
“And is this your home?” cried Sir John, very much aghast.
“It be, young man. They bruk’ all my lattices months agone, an’ Mr.
Sturton won’t put in no more. The chimbley smokes an’ the thatch
leaks an’ I gets the ager bad, but it be my home an’ I love every
brick. For ’twas here I were born, here I loved and lost, here I hoped
to die, but Maaster Sturton be fur turning o’ me out next month ...
bean’t ’e, Jarge?”
“’E be,” answered Mr. Potter softly, “dang ’im!”
“Come in, young man, an’ you tu, Jarge—come in; it du be better-
lookin’ inside than out.” And indeed, once the door was shut—a
particularly stout and ponderous door, Sir John noticed—the small,
heavily beamed chamber was cosy and homelike, very orderly and
clean, from the polished copper kettle on the hob to the china
ornaments upon the mantel.
And now Mr. Potter reached a hand within the mysteries of the
frieze coat and drew thence a couple of plump rabbits.
“Found ’em s’marnin’, Pen,” he nodded. “An’ here,” he continued,
groping deeper within vast pocket, “’ere be a—no, that be wire ...
’ere—no, that be ’baccy for ’Osea ... ah, ’ere be a lump o’ pork t’ go
wi’ ’em, Pen.”
“Thank’ee kindly, Jarge! An’ would ’ee moind a-skinnin’ of ’em
whiles I tidies myself up a bit?”
“Heartily, Pen.”
“An’ you, young man, poke up the fire an’ put on the kittle t’ bile ...
there be a pump in the yard.”
Having performed these duties, Sir John, seating himself on a
bucket beside the pump, watched Mr. Potter deftly operate upon the
rabbits, and there ensued the following conversation:

Mr. Potter: Stayin’ ’ereabouts, sir?

Sir John: At the ‘Dering Arms.’
Mr. Potter: Stayin’ long, sir?
Sir John: I hope so.
Mr. Potter: Why, so du I ... seein’ as you be known to
Sharkie an’ Sir ’Ector. And, besides, old Pen du ha’ took
to ye fair amazin’ ... an’ she’s an eye like a nawk ’as old
Pen, aye, sharp as a gimblet it be. An’ she’s took to ye,
d’ye see, sir.
Sir John: I feel truly and deeply honoured.
Mr. Potter: Well, you stood up for ’er s’arternoon agin them
fules as meant mischief.
Sir John: She seems to have suffered more than her share.
Mr. Potter: Suffered? Sir, Potter be a peaceable man an’
bloodshed contrariwise to ’is natur’ ... no matter what you
’appen to hear ... but there be some folk as I’d tak’ a deal
o’ j’y to skin, d’ye see, like this ’ere! (Mr. Potter held up a
newly skinned and pinkly nude rabbit.)
Sir John: Whom do you mean?
Mr. Potter: Ah! ’oo indeed, sir? Potter knows, but Potter’s
mum!
Sir John: And yet I think I could guess, if I tried.
Mr. Potter: Why, ye may guess, sir—this be a free country
—leastways, fules say so.
Sir John: One, I think, must be Mr. James Sturton. Am I
right?
Mr. Potter: Why, as to that, sir, I answers plain and to the
point as there be nobody nowhere breathin’ as can get
s’much flavour into a jugged ’are ekal to old Pen—except
Peter Bunkle as keeps the ‘Cross’ over tu Alfriston.
Sir John: And the second is Lord Sayle. Am I wrong?
Mr. Potter: Why, as to that, sir, Potter don’t say nothing. Du
’ee know Lord Sayle?
Sir John: I have met him.
Mr. Potter: Friend o’ yourn, sir?
Sir John: So much so that I have determined to drive him out
of the country, or kill him.
(Here Mr. Potter dropped the rabbit.)
Mr. Potter: Well ... love my limbs! Kill—hist! But ... but you,
sir? Axing your pardon, but you aren’t got the look of a
killer.
Sir John: Thank you, Mr. Potter, I rejoice to hear it.
Mr. Potter: But—ki—hist! He be pretty big and pretty fierce,
sir, an’ you, axing y’r pardon, ain’t exactly——
Sir John: An elephant or a tiger—and yet I feel myself
perfectly able to accomplish one or the other, Mr. Potter.
Mr. Potter: Well, love my eyes! He be a fightin’ man too, sir!
Somebody stuck a sword into him lately, I hear, but it
didn’t do no good; he be as well and ’earty as ever. Now
if—hist!
(Here Mr. Potter paused, finger on lip, to glance stealthily
around.)
Sir John: If what, Mr. Potter?
Mr. Potter: (Drawing near and speaking in hushed voice) If
you be ... set on a-doin’ of it ... very determined on ... the
deed, sir, your best way is to—hist! A pistol ... no, a
musket ... some good dark night. Hist—Potter’s mum!
Sir John: You don’t love him, I think?
Mr. Potter: Love him? Well, there be things ’as ’appened
’ereabouts as no one can’t swear agin nobody, d’ye see,
an’ yet ... old Pen knows more than she dare speak, I
rackon, an’ Potter ain’t blind nor yet deaf.
Sir John: What kind of things?
Mr. Potter: Well, theer was poor Dick Hobden as went a-
walkin’ one evenin’ Windover way wi’ Lucy Price, a rare
handsome lass. Poor Dick were found stone dead next
day, but the lass vanished an’ nobody never seen her no
more, nor never will, I reckon.
Sir John: Vanished?
Mr. Potter: Ay, like Mary Beal as disappeared and came
back and drownded of ’erself, pore lass. There was Ruth
Wicks as likewise vanished an’ was found weeks
arterwards singin’ in the dark atop o’ Windover ... died
 mad, she did. There was other lasses as disappeared
from Wilmington an’ Litlin’ton an’ never come back.
Sir John: A hateful tale!
Mr. Potter: It be, sir.
Sir John: And whom do you suspect?
Mr. Potter: Mum for that, sir! But there be folk as Potter
would be j’yful to ’ave the skinnin’ of——
Sir John: You mean my Lord Sayle and Sturton——
Mr. Potter: Hist—sir! Speak soft! I don’t mean nothin’. Only
what one bids t’other obeys.... And now Lord Sayle
swears he’ll ruin all on us—every man an’ bye, ah,
wumman, maid an’ babe, not forgettin’ wives an’ widders.
Sir John: How so?
Mr. Potter: He’s took an oath to put down “the trade,” d’ye
see. Potter be a inoffensive creater’ as never drawed
steel in his life—except mebbe now and then—I prefers a
short bat ... and never fired a shot in all my days—except
p’r’aps once or twice an’ then only when com-pelled....
Ah, a peaceable man be Potter, but....

Here Mr. Potter laid finger to lip and looked slantwise at Sir John
beneath lifted eyebrow. And then old Penelope called them; and,
glancing round, Sir John was amazed to behold her clad in a
sumptuous gown whose voluminous silken folds lent her a strangely
arresting dignity, while upon her snowy hair was a mob cap
marvellously belaced.
“Aye, it be real silk, young man!” quoth she, with a little shake in
her voice. “List to it rustle!” And sighing ecstatically, she spread out
the rich folds with her gnarled old fingers. “There bean’t a grander
dress nowhere.... Jarge give it me las’ Christmas. ’Tidn’t often I
wears it, no ... but when I die, I’ll be buried in it—won’t I, Jarge?”
 “Aye, aye, Pen!” nodded Mr. Potter. “But, Lord—’oo’s a-talkin’ o’
dyin’! Be the kittle abilin’?”
“Aye, lad, tea’s ready. As for you, young man, if you’ll drink wi’ me
as they name witch, an’ bean’t fruttened lest I blast ’ee wi’ a look o’
my eye—come your ways to tea.”
Following her into the cottage, Sir John beheld yet other
unexpected wonders, as the handleless cups of exquisite ware, the
beautiful Chinese teapot, the tray of priceless Chinese lacquer.
“Aha, you may stare, young man!” nodded old Penelope. “There
bean’t a lady in arl the land can show ’ee sech chaney as mine....
Jarge give it tu me!”
“Why, ye see, sir,” added Mr. Potter apologetically, “I bean’t
married!”
“An’ look at the lace in my cap, young man ... real French point—
arl from Jarge.”
“Why, ye see, sir,” quoth Mr. Potter again, “I aren’t got no
sweet’eart!”
And thus Sir John Dering, sitting between old Penelope Haryott
the witch, and Mr. George Potter the guileless, drank smuggled tea
out of smuggled china, talked and listened, asked questions and
answered them, and enjoyed it all uncommonly well.