The Forgotten Blackwood

The early morning of March 19th, 1806, fell like molten lead over Blackwood Plantation. In the sultry lands of the Georgia lowcountry, where the air smelled of burnt pine knots and the rich, dark earth of the rice fields, a secret was about to be born that would divide a family for generations.

Inside the main house, a grand Greek Revival mansion with white columns and wide verandas, the smell was different: fresh blood, the sweat of agony, and something denser—fear.

Mrs. Mary Josephine Blackwood screamed in the master bedroom. She was 26. Her dark chestnut hair, normally arranged in an elaborate southern style, was now plastered to her forehead, soaked in sweat. Her hazel eyes, admired throughout Glynn County, now reflected not physical pain, but panic.

The heavy velvet curtains trembled with each contraction. Five beeswax candles cast dancing shadows on the floral-papered walls. The heart-pine floor creaked under the nervous steps of Miss Sarah Caldwell, the most respected midwife from Savannah to Darien. She was 62, with gnarled but expert hands. She had brought over 300 children into the world in 40 years of practice. That night, her worn face in the flickering light revealed that something was not going as expected.

“Push, Mrs. Blackwood,” she ordered, her voice firm but tired.

The first baby arrived crying loudly. Then the second, with the same vigorous cry that echoed through the house. When the third arrived, silence cut the night like a sharpened cane knife.

The baby did not cry, but it was alive. It breathed softly. Its tiny closed eyes fluttered in the golden candlelight. Miss Sarah wrapped it in a white cotton cloth. She approached Mrs. Blackwood to show her, and in that precise instant, everything changed.

The baby’s skin was darker than its brothers’. Much darker. Unmistakably African features were marked on its tiny face.

Mary Josephine opened her hazel eyes and looked at the newborn. Her face contorted into an expression that was not of maternal pain. It was disgust. It was horror. It was absolute rejection.

“Get that out of here,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “Right now.”

Miss Sarah froze. “Ma’am, he is your son. He is healthy. He’s just a little more—”

“Get him out!” Mary Josephine interrupted, her voice as cutting as broken crystal. “And never bring him back to me.”

**Patience** was in the kitchen of the main house. She had just turned 40. Skin black as jet, marked by ancient whip scars on her back, hands calloused from 25 years of washing clothes in the creek. Born somewhere on the coast of Guinea she would never see again. Sold from a slave ship in Charleston when she was barely 8. Her dark eyes had seen too much. They had seen her mother die of fever in the swamps. They had seen her first husband sold to a cotton plantation in Alabama. They had seen two of her own children die before their first year. Only **Eve**, her 6-year-old daughter—the product of a rape by the former overseer—remained, along with the permanent fear that she, too, would be sold down the river.

That early morning, while stirring a pot of grits on the iron stove, she heard the urgent call from the upper floor.

“Patience! Come up. Immediately.”

She climbed the servant’s stairs with a racing heart. Each step was a dull thud in the darkness. Her bare feet made almost no sound against the cold wood. In the second-floor hallway, the smell of blood intensified. She pushed open the door to the master bedroom.

Miss Sarah waited for her by the window overlooking the inner garden. In her arms, a bundle of white cloths stained with fresh blood. The midwife’s eyes were moist, her lips trembling.

“Take him far away,” she whispered in a broken voice. “Very far away. And never return with him. May God forgive you. May He forgive us all.”

Patience received the bundle. She looked at the sleeping face of the baby. He was small. Innocent. His pink lips trembled slightly. Tears burned her eyes. She knew exactly what that order meant.

The boy had darker skin than his brothers. Much darker. The African features were unmistakable. Curly black hair, full lips, a broad nose. In a slave society obsessed with bloodlines and racial purity, this child was evidence of something the Blackwood family could never admit. Mr. **Francis Jeremiah Blackwood**, the plantation’s master and a leading figure in the county, must never suspect. The family’s honor, their social standing, depended on it. The Blackwood name, one of the founding families of Georgia, direct descendants of Revolutionary War heroes, could not be stained with the evidence that their blood had mixed.

Blackwood Plantation slept under the March full moon. Patience crossed the yard past the smokehouse and the carriage house. Her bare feet sank into the sandy soil. She looked back. The big house was lit by candles. Its white columns gleamed like bones. Then she looked towards the slave quarters—a row of twenty crude log cabins with clay chinking, where the enslaved Africans and their descendants slept. Her own daughter, Eve, slept there, on a corn-shuck mattress in the farthest corner.

“Forgive me, my God,” Patience whispered, pressing the baby to her chest. The child stirred slightly, emitting a soft sound. He still didn’t cry, as if he knew his life depended on silence.

In the distance, crickets chirped, frogs croaked in the swamp, a fox barked far away. Patience knew that if she returned with this child, she would be whipped to death. The plantation’s overseer, Mr. **Brutus Hawkins**, was known for his cruelty. Three years earlier, he had ordered a woman named **Janie** whipped to death for allegedly stealing a silver spoon. The spoon was later found in the mistress’s sewing basket. No one apologized. No one was punished. Janie was buried without a marker in the slave burial ground beyond the pecan grove.

If she obeyed the order, if she let this child die, she would carry that weight in her soul until her last day.

She walked for over two hours. She followed the creek that marked the eastern boundary of the plantation. Her feet bled. Briars from the blackberry thickets tore at her skin, but she did not stop.

Finally, she reached a place she knew well: an abandoned sharecropper’s shack near the boundary with the pine barrens. It had belonged to an old trapper who died of consumption years before. No one had dared to live there since. The log walls were half-fallen. The pine-slab roof had holes letting in moonlight. The dirt floor was damp and smelled of mildew and abandonment.

Patience knelt and placed the baby on an old quilt she had hidden under her shawl. It was a quilt of coarse, rough wool, but it was all she had. She looked at the newborn’s calm face.

“You deserved more, my son,” she wept, using a word she knew was not true. He was not her son. He was the son of Mrs. Blackwood. But in that moment, something inside her broke, and something else began to form. A decision. A promise. An act of silent rebellion that would change everything.

Patience returned to the big house before dawn. She entered through the kitchen door as the first lights of dawn began to tinge the sky peach. Her hands trembled; her face was wet with dried tears and sweat. Her dress was stained with dirt and pine straw.

She heard the clatter of horses in the main drive. Her blood froze. Mr. Francis Jeremiah Blackwood had arrived earlier than expected. He was coming from Charleston. He had traveled for four days to be present for the birth of his children. But the birth had come early.

Patience heard his booming voice shouting orders in the yard. “See to the horses! And someone tell Mrs. Blackwood I am home!” Then, heavy footsteps on the veranda. The sound of his riding boots against the heart-pine planks.

“Where is my wife? Have my sons been born?” he shouted, his voice thick with anticipation.

Patience hid in the pantry. Her heart beat so loudly she thought everyone could hear it.

Mr. Blackwood took the main stairs two at a time. In the hallway, he crossed paths with Miss Sarah, who was coming down with a basin.

“Miss Caldwell! How many?” he asked, grabbing her arm.

“Three, Mr. Blackwood. Three baby boys. Triplets. A miracle from God.”

His face lit with a triumphant joy. “Three heirs! Three Blackwoods!” He strode into the bedroom.

But he saw only two babies. Mary Josephine lay in the four-poster bed, pale as the linen. She held two swaddled infants.

“Francis…” she whispered weakly. “There were three… but one… the weakest… did not survive. He was born blue. Miss Caldwell tried everything… but God called him home.” She sobbed convincingly.

Francis Jeremiah Blackwood stood silent for a long moment. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, with a thick red-brown beard and the imperious gaze of a man born to rule. He had just turned 42. He wore the dust of travel on his fine broadcloth coat.

“He died,” he repeated softly. He made the sign of the cross. “God’s will. These two will be strong. They will be the heirs of Blackwood. We will name them **Francis Jr.** and **Jeremiah**.”

Mary Josephine breathed a sigh of relief. The lie had worked.

Patience, hidden below, heard everything. The dark-skinned baby abandoned in the pine barrens was officially nonexistent. A ghost. A secret.

***

The following years were of apparent normality at Blackwood. The twins, Frank and Jem, grew like young princes of the South. They had tutors, fine clothes, and ponies. They learned Latin, scripture, riding, and shooting. They had their father’s fair skin and light hair.

Patience worked day and night. But her mind was in the pine barrens. Three nights after the birth, she could bear it no longer. She returned to the shack, expecting to find a tiny corpse.

Instead, she heard a weak cry.

*The baby was alive.*

She fell to her knees. “Miracle,” she wept.

She took the child in her arms and made her decision. She would not abandon him. She would visit him every night. She would raise him in secret. She named him.

“You will be called **Sunday,**” she whispered, “because you were born for a rest this world won’t give you, child.”

**Five years passed.** Blackwood Plantation prospered. The rice fields flourished. Francis Blackwood grew richer and more powerful.

Sunday, now 5, lived hidden in the same shack. He was dark, strong, and clever. Patience visited him every night, bringing stolen food and scraps of love. She taught him to be silent, to hide, to survive.

Her daughter Eve, now 11, grew suspicious. One night she followed her mother and discovered the secret. Patience, weeping, told her everything. Eve swore to keep it, but the injustice of it—that this hidden boy was a blood brother to the little masters strutting around the plantation—began to burn in her heart.

The unraveling began on a hot August afternoon in 1811. The twins, Frank and Jem, now 5, escaped their tutor and rode their ponies into the pine woods on a pretended hunting expedition. They stumbled upon the shack and saw Sunday sitting outside. They were shocked by his dark skin but unnerved by his familiar features—their father’s jawline, their own dimple.

“Who are you?” Frank demanded.

Sunday, trained in silence, just stared.

“He’s a runaway,” Jem said, but he sounded unsure.

They rode home in a troubled silence. The mystery festered. They began to watch Patience, to piece together the story. They heard her call Sunday “son” through the shack wall. They connected the dates. The story of the third brother who died at birth.

Finally, they confronted their mother in the sunlit parlor.

“You lied to us about the brother who died,” Frank accused.

Mary Josephine turned as white as her lace collar. The truth, once spoken, could not be taken back. She broke down and confessed everything between wrenching sobs.

That night, Frank, unable to bear the secret, told his father.

Francis Jeremiah Blackwood’s rage shook the plantation. He roared for Patience. She was dragged to the main yard before all the assembled slaves. Chains were placed on her wrists.

“You hid my son,” he thundered, a rawhide whip in his hand.

Patience, kneeling in the dirt, looked up with a dignity that stunned the crowd. “Yes, sir, I did. Your wife ordered him left to die in the woods ’cause he was born dark. I didn’t have the heart for it. I raised him hungry and cold, but alive.”

Francis Blackwood stood frozen, the whip held high. “Where is he?” he finally asked, his voice dangerously low.

“In the old trapper’s shack by the creek. Waiting for me, like every night.”

“Bring him here. Now.”

They brought Sunday to the yard at dusk. The child was terrified, dirty, dressed in rags. When he saw Patience in chains, he cried out, “Mama Patience!” and tried to run to her.

Francis Blackwood knelt in front of the boy. He looked into his face, searching, comparing. And there it was—his own blood looking back at him from a dark-skinned face. His son. The living proof of his wife’s infidelity and attempted murder.

He stood slowly and turned to the crowd, his voice echoing in the twilight.

“This boy… is a Blackwood. He has my blood. Blood doesn’t hide.”

He looked at Patience. “You saved my son when my own wife wanted him dead. For that… you are free. You and your daughter Eve. This day.”

The gasps from the crowd were audible. Patience and Eve wept in disbelief.

Then he took Sunday’s small, dirty hand. “This boy will live here. In the big house. He will have the name Blackwood. He will learn with his brothers. He will be my son, for that is what he is.”

He turned a ferocious gaze on Mary Josephine, who stood weeping on the veranda. “Let the town talk, woman. Let them tell the truth—that you tried to murder a child for the color of his skin. Let them judge who the monster is.”

***

The years that followed were of painful transformation. **Sunday Blackwood** was given a room, an education, and his father’s acknowledgment. But he never forgot the shack, the hunger, the fear. He visited Patience and Eve every week; they now lived as free women in a small cabin in the nearby town of Brunswick, a gift from his father.

He grew up divided—between the big house and the quarters, between privilege and the memory of bondage. It made him different. More compassionate. More aware.

When Francis Blackwood died in 1825, he divided his land among his three sons. Sunday, then 19, made a decision that shocked the Georgia gentry. He sold his inherited acres and used the fortune to buy the freedom of every slave on Blackwood Plantation—all 67 men, women, and children. He gave them their manumission papers and helped them settle on land he purchased for them.

Before he died, the old master had grasped Sunday’s hand. “You are better than I was,” he whispered. “You did what I never had the courage to do.”

Patience died in 1826, surrounded by Sunday, Eve, and her grandchildren. Sunday held her hand and whispered, “Thank you, Mother. For letting me live.”

Sunday Blackwood lived until 1854. He never married but dedicated his life to the abolitionist cause, funding schools for free Black children, assisting runaways on the Underground Railroad, and writing fierce polemics against the “peculiar institution.” He carried the mark of two worlds but chose to be a bridge, not a wall.

The boy born to be erased, condemned for the color of his skin, became a light. His story is a whisper from the past, a testament that in the darkest corners of history, love and courage could defy even the most brutal systems.