Much moon to you

a literal translation is an inaccurate translation.

In a more well-known example,  Natsume Soseki, a great writer who wrote, I am a Cat, had his students translate “I love you,” to “the moon is beautiful [because of] having you beside tonight,” because Japanese men would not say such strong emotions right away. He said that it would be weird and Japanese men would have more elegance.

54. Salt. Salt is life. If we have too little sodium in our blood (hyponatremia), all sorts of bad things can happen to us, including seizure, coma, and death.

Of course, most folks worry about too much salt. The average American gets about 3.5 grams of sodium a day, which puts us only in the middle of the pack. The world average seems to be about 4 grams. Some countries, from Central Asia to East Asia, eat much higher amounts. The Japanese may be ingesting as much as 13 grams a day.

Intake is much lower in sub-Saharan Africa. In some cases, it’s at or below the intake considered necessary. This may explain why High Blood Pressure (HBP) is a special problem for African Americans. According to the American Heart Association, more than 40% of non-Hispanic blacks are hypertensive. HBP seems to hit blacks harder, and it seems to start earlier in life. 

It appears that African Americans are genetically predisposed to be more sensitive to salt. Their ancestors were forced, through slavery, to live in an environment that encouraged excessive salt intake, far beyond what was typical in Africa. Salt pork or bacon was an essential part of the Southern diet for whites and blacks alike. Before refrigeration, anything not consumed fresh was probably salted. Today, even with our concerns about sodium intake, we get only about half of the sodium that the average American consumed in 1800.

But many components of “soul food” dishes are high in sodium, from sausages, to fried bologna sandwiches, to ribs prepared with salty rubs. One teaspoon of Louisiana brand hot sauce equals 10% of your recommended sodium intake. A whiff (¼ teaspoon) of my favorite seasoning, Slap Ya Mama, is 13%. Half a cup of Bush’s canned baby butter beans is 20%. It all adds up, quickly. 

Where does all that salt come from? It became a strategic issue in the Civil War. The Union’s Gen. Sherman declared that salt was as important as gunpowder. "Without salt they cannot make bacon and salt beef,“ he said, and thus, the Confederate “armies cannot be subsisted.” It takes about one pound of salt to produce nine pounds of bacon, and even more to preserve beef. So Union troops attacked salt production points on the North Carolina coast, at Saltville, Va., and other spots, while the Union Navy’s blockade kept out a lot of the salt the rebels tried to import from Wales.

Salt was a strategic mineral. One important site of salt production was in the southern tip of Illinois, the Great Salt Springs along the Saline River, in Gallatin County, near the Kentucky border. The main springs were Half Moon Lick and the repugnantly-named “Nigger Spring,” which points to the issue at hand:

Salt from saline springs is extracted by evaporating brine. But of course it takes water a long time to evaporate on its own, especially in a temperate climate. So the water must be boiled off in large evaporation pans. That, in turn, requires large amounts of firewood (and later, coal). The whole process was both arduous and labor-intensive.

Before English settlement, the French, who had learned about the saline springs from the Native Americans, worked the saline springs using slaves brought in from the Caribbean. By the end of the 1700s, the French were using slaves all the way up the Mississippi valley, as far as northwest Iowa and the lead mines of Julien Dubuque.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had forbidden slavery in the territory that included Illinois. But the French-owned slaves already there were exempted. Meanwhile, settlers from Tennessee and Kentucky had brought in their own slaves, and flatly refused to give them up. In 1805, the Indiana Territorial legislature passed a law specifically allowing slaves to be brought in to man the salt works. By 1820, the census showed 500 slaves in Gallatin and Randolph counties.

Slavery in Illinois finally became illegal in 1825, but a loophole was created for the salt works, which were leased from the state. The biggest salt works, covering 30,000 acres, were leased to John Crenshaw (1797-1871), who had more than 700 slaves working the salt furnaces and adjacent coal mines. 

Crenshaw became incredibly wealthy, and Illinois profited as well. At one point, his slaves were generating one-seventh of the state’s budget.

Crenshaw had a mansion built for himself, Hickory Hill. It is now known as the Old Slave House. 

Crenshaw was interested in breeding slaves for sale, and his slave quarters included a room known as the “breeding room” or “Uncle Bob’s room.” Crenshaw had imported a slave named Bob, who had a reputation for producing strong and healthy babies, and would force enslaved females to have sex with him.

Hickory Hill was also a station on the so-called Reverse Underground Railroad. It is said that he used the third floor to house captured escaped slaves, as well as kidnapped free blacks, before they were taken into the slave states. The small cells are said to have ring bolts in the floor, for shackling his prisoners. In 1848, Crenshaw lost a leg when the slaves attacked him while he was beating some female slaves.

Crenshaw was indicted at least twice for his slave trading and kidnapping activities, but he seems to have escaped conviction. Under the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, northerners were legally required to catch and return escaped slaves, and so Crenshaw’s slave trading was essentially legalized. In that same year, he and his family moved into the nearby town, ironically named Equality. A German family was hired to move into the house and run the farm. Since then, it is said that some 150 people have reported that the third floor is haunted.

The house was given to the state in 2000, but it is closed. Its morbid historical significance is clear, but no one quite seems to know what to do with it. 

It’s one of the sickening ironies of America’s slave-based economy that enslaved African Americans were forced to produce a product that continues to shorten their descendants’ lives. 

The Crenshaw House also raises questions of social justice. Salt production was a vital industry, and the State of Illinois profited directly and significantly from the use of slave labor.

Illinois was not alone. Many of Iowa’s earliest settlers in the 1830s came from slave states, and some, including a number of public officials, brought their slaves with them. Slaves were held by Army officers at Fort Snelling, in Minnesota. Of course, the most famous Minnesota slave was Dred Scott, of the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision that declared, against Scott, that “Blacks had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.”

In Wisconsin, the French fur traders had slaves, and later, in the lead mining district in the southwest corner of the state, the territory’s first settlers, many from the south, brought slaves with them. Even the Nebraska Territory, virtually unsettled before the Civil War, counted 13 slaves in 1854.

Cleaning up the problem of slaves in free states caused harm in other ways as well. Some settlers who had brought their slaves with them would free them, but others would ship them back to the south for sale. Being “sold down the river” to the misery of the huge cotton plantations in the deep south was especially terrifying. An 1842 case against Crenshaw concerned a slave, Maria Adams, and her children, who had been shipped off to Texas. 

Slavery in the Midwest was controversial, of course. Slave holders from Missouri, for instance, stirred up trouble in the southeast corner of Iowa when they insisted that Iowans help them track down escaped slaves. The Texas Ordinance of Secession complained about Iowa as one of the states that was not upholding the “rights” of slave owners to their “property.”