His mother lived with him in the house. She had worked there as a slave; she lived there as a free woman in the home of her son. The documents do not tell us in detail what the daily experience of those years felt like for Lydia Polite Smalls. What they tell us is that she lived in that house, in her son’s household, until her death.
The decision to allow Jane McKee — the elderly widow of Henry McKee — to live in the house before her death is sometimes cited as evidence of Smalls’s magnanimity, sometimes as evidence of a complicated relationship with the family that had held him and his mother as property, and sometimes treated as puzzling from a distance that doesn’t account for the specific social and relational context of postbellum South Carolina. What it was, at minimum, was a decision he made about a specific person in a specific situation, without any legal or social obligation to make it. The house was his. The choice was his.
## John Small and the Recognition of Crewmates
John Small deserves specific attention in any account of the escape precisely because his name is so close to Robert Smalls’s that the confusion between them has a long history in accounts of the Planter’s escape.
John Small was the engineer aboard the Planter. He was enslaved, as were the other crew members who participated in the escape. His wife Susan and their son Philip were among the sixteen people who sought freedom on the morning of May 13. His sister-in-law was also aboard.