“Ready to Die”: The Notorious Cuff, a Resistant Enslaved (Akan) Male in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey

Abstract

This essay explores the little-known yet fascinating 1767 murder of Daniel Hart at the hands of his enslaved male named Cuff, an alleged Akan person from Ghana, West Africa. The murder provides a crucial interpretive window into eighteenth-century New Jersey and the hostile relationship between bondmen and their male enslavers that could be described as warfare, that is, as a constant state of conflict that involved violent coercion. In its attempt to hear Cuff's muted oppositional voice, the essay engages a range of sources, including a popular rap song from the 1990s. In doing so, the essay refutes the portrayal of Cuff as evil, lazy, and hence, historically irrelevant. It frames the bondman as empowered by his Akan culture, which encouraged him to resent his existence under a white patriarchal system that degraded him in various ways, and in a larger white patriarchal society that policed his Black body, thereby making permanent escape an impossibility. Feeling boxed in by slavery and the larger society, Cuff took Hart's life and then his own, with the idea of making a spiritual journey to the ancestral realm. Armed with the weapon of cultural suicide, Cuff had reached the point in his war with Hart where he was, to borrow from rapper Notorious B.I.G., “ready to die.” Cuff's obscured story sheds important light on the destructive ramifications of New Jersey slavery, suggesting that Blacks fought whites for the preservation of their bodies and sense of self-worth with powerful (hidden) weapons.