Collect Day #34, CAESAR PARKER
O loving and gracious God, who created each and every one of us with Your unlimited Love: we lift up your servant Caesar Parker who was bold and unafraid to face a new challenge and his mixed-race children who suffered prejudice for being seen as different; Help us to see each other in the same loving light in which You created us that we love and embrace all humankind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
DAY #34, March 24, 2018
Weare & Mont Vernon
CAESAR PARKER
Reginald Pitts
The stories of early African American residents survive only through anecdotes. This is true of Caesar Parker, originally from Methuen, Mass., and later of Weare, NH. Although a longtime resident of Mont Vernon, for a time Parker lived in Milford. Parker is a good example of the clown-character typical of white descriptions of free African Americans in antebellum accounts.
In this case, the source of Parker’s portrait is native son John Hutchinson of the famous antislavery Hutchinson Singers. According to Hutchinson, Parker was a town “character,” remembered as “Black as the ace of spades.” He was “a tall, well-proportioned, athletic, uneducated but witty African” who worked on farms in Milford and Amherst.
Hutchinson recalls that Parker was “quite conspicuous on public occasions, like trainings, musters, and holidays, with the b’hoys, who were fond of scuffling and wrestling. He was always brought into the ring under the influence of a glass or two, which was freely furnished him, was sufficiently bold and sprightly, and could bring down, to the amusement of all, almost any of those selected to scuffle or wrestle.” In fact, Parker appears in two comedic stories recounted by John Hutchinson.
In the first, a young White girl, jilted by her lover, is heard to sigh that she would marry the first man that asked her. “Some wag,” writes Hutchinson, goes up to Parker, tells him that “’Miss So-and-So is very fond of you,’ and that if he hastens to her and proposes marriage, she would accept. Consequently, this colored man dressed himself in his best overalls, repaired to the house, and boldly made his proposition; and to his great delight the lady agreed that he should be her suitor. Subsequently they married, and the result was that instead of one Black man in our neighborhood, there soon grew up five boys and two girls of a lighter hue.” The second story shows Parker out trapping for beaver along the banks of the Souhegan River. It describes his consternation when he found out someone placed a dead house cat in his trap.
In addition to such patronizing anecdotes, public records show that Caesar Parker and Margaret Spear of New Ipswich, NH, married around 1800 and had five boys and two girls. Although they were remembered as “athletic and dexterous” and “fond of music,” the boys felt keenly the sting of being different in homogeneous Milford. While they were able to attend the district schools, there “was observable a notable reservation and withdrawing from the common plays and sports of the children.” Later, one of the sons, described as “a very agreeable, pleasant man, speaking familiarly of his relation and his condition, said he would suffer to be skinned alive if he could rid himself of his color.”
