by Rachel May
Keith said, “Every spring, Newport Africans gathered to elect a governor. The whites called it ‘Negro Election Day.’”
Kendall Moore, URI professor and documentary filmmaker, said, “That’s so ignorant. [Many of] these people were royalty back home.”
People who had been kidnapped from royal families in West Africa did not forget their histories. The annual elections were several days long and included a parade. In order to vote, one needed to own a pig. The election was held under the biggest fig tree in town, as was the tradition in Ghana. When disputes over property, marriage, or other issues arose, people were sent to the leader to resolve it.
I think of Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, whose story is narrated by Mos Def in the film Prince Among Slaves in 2006, based on the book by Terry Alford, and of Olaudah Equiano, who told his own story in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Olaudah’s father was “Embranche,” a leader in the Benen community where Olaudah grew up; his father would have been one of those decision makers who heard cases under the tree. Olaudah was kidnapped and brought across the Middle Passage to England, then the West Indies—Barbados—and then Virginia, before being permitted to buy his own freedom by his owner, a Quaker man. Olaudah’s autobiography, published in 1789, helped promote abolition and end the international slave trade.
He wrote about his time traveling the world aboard ships: “In twenty-eight days time we arrived in England, and I got clear of this ship. But, being still of a roving disposition, and desirous of seeing as many different parts of the world as I could, I shipped myself soon after, in the same year, as steward on board of a fine large ship, called the Jamaica, Captain David Watt; and we sailed from England in December 1771 for Nevis and Jamaica. I found Jamaica to be a very fine large island, well peopled, and the most considerable of the West India islands. There was a vast number of negroes here, whom I found as usual exceedingly imposed upon by the white people, and the slaves punished as in the other islands. . . .” Olaudah Equiano became a merchant and worked as a ship steward and captain. He recorded notes on his travels that became his autobiography, and then traveled to promote his book and the abolition of enslaved people. He’s credited with helping to pass Britain’s Slave Trade Act of 1807, outlawing the trade; the United States would follow with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which took effect in January 1808.
Olaudah Equiano.
Keith says that people were “not slaves but enslaved people. We didn’t come as blank slates. We came with our history.”
Even in this earlier era of the eighteenth century, free blacks and people who had claimed their own freedom by running away from their owners, fought in the Revolutionary War, helping secure the United States’ victory over Britain. The freedom we celebrate each Fourth of July is thanks, in part, to people like this man, whose name is unknown but who stands proud in a Continental Navy uniform, using his skills as a sailor and seaman to help win the war for a country that then, in 1776, didn’t guarantee his freedom nor grant him citizenship as a voter and property owner. When he fought this war, the international slave trade was still alive and well, and after the creation of the United States in the Declaration of Independence, the domestic trade would carry on for another eighty years.
Attributed to James Martin, Portrait of a Gentleman, ca. 1820.
But Keith Stokes would want the focus of this story not to be on the slave trade itself, but on the accomplishments and what we knew about the inner lives of people who were oppressed, mistreated, tortured, and still prevailed. When I asked him and his wife, Theresa, if we should have markers of the slave trade down at the harbors in Newport and Bristol, to make this history known, they said, “No. That’s not going to help our young people today. Our young people need to see the strength of their ancestors, to learn about all the talented people who came here and worked as doctors, skilled craftsmen, talented chocolate makers—these are the individual stories that can give a person pride and hope.”
When we left the cemetery in Newport, I drove back over the two bridges—from Newport to Jamestown Island, to South County, the mainland, then through the woods to my house in Kingston, formerly known as Little Rest, where once George Washington stayed—in my very house—on his way to meet with Rochambeau in 1781. My house, like most in my neighborhood, was bordered by an old stone wall and sat amidst the forests of the Great Swamp, five miles north of the sea. In the late 1700s, it would have looked very different, with clear-cut rolling hills of the plantations that produced cheese that was sent to the Caribbean to feed enslaved people. This is the land for which our state is (still) named—Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. When I take my dog to the Great Swamp, we follow the stone walls that run along the trails, converge in intersections, creating grids that have been erased by trees and brush and time. They meander back into the woods, then disappear to my eyes, their trails broken by a hill, by an ambitious cluster of trees. Here, in 1675, the “Great Swamp Fight” broke out when colonizers attacked the Narragansett and Niantic nations, who were led by King Philip; Mohegans and Pequots fought the British alongside the Narragansett and Niantic. The battle ended in the woods, when colonists burned women and children in their homes or forced them into the snow on a freezing night.
The more I learn, the more these woods change in my eyes, and I’m surrounded by that violence. I visit the site of the Great Swamp Massacre just once, in the summertime; it takes hours, and two trips with a local friend, to find the path that leads to the marker for the massacre. Half of it has been vandalized, removed. There’s no marker along the road to tell us where to find this place. We find it only by searching several websites and old, printed maps, and asking my friend’s family members. I think of the contrast between this history that’s been nearly silenced in the landscape, and the history of the Revolutionary War that’s well-marked and celebrated all over my hometown in Concord. The winter after we found the marker, I walked the woods nearby all winter long, and imagine the terror of being burned out of one’s house into the snow, a baby nestled against a woman’s chest as she raced toward safety.
Sometimes, I imagine people coming alive in the trees, clearing fields with hoes and oxen and donkeys, cutting trees, digging rows in the dirt in which to plant seeds. There’s a woman carrying a pot to the well to make soup for dinner, and a boy bringing an ax to a chicken’s neck on the chopping block in the yard, and a man setting stones onto a wall. The air is humid and thick in summer, heavy with flies that sting when they bite, and cold in winter with several feet of snow, a climate so foreign to western Africans who must have shivered come September, and so familiar to the tribal nations who lived here that they must have mourned the land’s transformation under colonists’ forced possession.
I think about Middleton Place, where enslaved people knew how to irrigate acres of fields into symmetrical pools of water and tributaries and sections that would flood with the tides. About the skill it took to irrigate land this way, and about Jimmy who knew how to build furniture like the crib he made for little Hasell and about the clothes and coverings Jane must have made with her skill as a seamstress. I imagine a seam embellished with an embroidered blue cotton stitch that looks like herringbone, around a seam from which a row of pleats rise. Let’s imagine this is a neckline on a dress she made for Eliza when she heard they would soon be sold and separated, and that Jane kept it secret until the day they were to be parted. Before Eliza was taken by Winthrop to be sold, depressed all week as she saw the date approach, maybe Jane found her in the morning and slipped the dress into her hands. Maybe it was white with blue embroidery around every seam, and maybe Eliza took it with her and hid it in her room, and before she had to go to the man who rented her each day, she traced the marks Jane made to remind her she was never alone.
When I visited Charleston, I went to Sullivan’s Island, to see if I could find the place where Eliza had once lived. I would not be able
to find the site of this house, though I did find the site of the city house on Cumberland Street. Out on Sullivan’s Island, at dusk, I drove to Fort Moultrie and walked to the beach, past the sign commemorating the tens of thousands of people who were brought across the sea against their will, to step foot onto this land. I stood on the beach, looking out at those seemingly peaceful waters, and I thought of Christine Mitchell’s words about these waters that she sees as a graveyard, and I wept. “Places have power,” a friend said later. “You can feel the past.” Sunset approached, and I meandered slowly back toward the bridge, the city. On my way, I saw this marker, and pulled over on the side of the road.
The wooden crosses that once marked the graves have disintegrated, and all we know now is that the people who are buried there are of African American descent, and that they are the people responsible for “help[ing] to build the historic structures that have enhanced the fabric of the island.” Fort Moultrie, which was used in the defense of the city many times over the years, including during the Civil War, is just one example of the places people buried here helped to create. They were “Carpenters, Cooks, Oystermen, Laundresses, Nursemaids, House Keepers, Midwives, Soldiers, and Seamen.” I imagine a man heading toward the marshes and inlets around this island to gather oysters at low tide, a rake over one shoulder and a bucket in his other hand. I think about the ingenuity and the labor of people who helped build this country’s wealth—John Camino, Newport Gardner, Arthur Flagg, Dinah—and the historians and activists I meet today who make sure their stories are remembered and heard, the people who make these markers to commemorate, to educate the public, to direct the stories of these places.
There’s no such thing as “nice” slavery, no such thing as the “kinder” slavery of the North, no “genteel” slave owners. That myth, that northern slavery wasn’t as bad as southern slavery, that some slave owners were kinder than others, persists. Who is retelling it? What did I learn in school? I only remember watching Roots in seventh grade, nothing about the history of New England slavery. No one ever told me that living alongside the transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts, were the descendants of enslaved people who settled in the 1830s, establishing communities of free people of color; I did not know that they had helped to build and sustain that town, the site of the “shot heard ’round the world,” the American Revolution, cradle of liberty. Every year, when “Paul Revere” rode through our bucolic central square at midnight hollering, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” his horse’s hooves clacking over pavement as we sat on the porch of the Colonial Inn to watch, someone should also have been proclaiming the other side of the story, the contradictions inherent in proclaiming a nation’s liberty when people were enslaved here; this part of the story, the story of the people who worked to build this nation while they were owned and before they were given full citizenship, is now illuminated by the installation of the Robbins House—named for the Robbins family, free people of color who lived in Concord in the 1830s—at the site of the Old North Bridge, and told in the book Black Walden, by Elise Lemire.
Ad for slave sale from the June 6, 1763 Newport Mercury.
When I was a child, or even a high-school student, or a student in college, no one told me to read Our Nig; Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Harriet Wilson’s story was published in 1859; she was born in the “free” North at about the same time as Susan, in the 1820s, and her story reveals the depths of racism that were prevalent in the decades that followed, answering, in part, the question I began with when I first found myself confronted with the words probably for slave gowns. Why did Susan, a northerner, so easily slip into the slaveholding culture of Charleston? Because she was raised with the racist beliefs that had perpetuated slavery in the North and South, because she probably always believed that people of color were inferior. And yet—her two younger sisters, Sarah and Eliza, were opposed to slavery. What would divide a family this way? What would make Susan and her brothers so easily embrace it while their sisters could not?
Susan and Hasell would join the same church as the Grimkes, St. Philip’s, in Charleston, and Winthrop would note the death of the elder Grimke, mother of Sarah and Angelina. Sarah and Angelina’s parents were slaveholders, secessionists, and yet the two young women became abolitionists, exposed the cruelties of slavery with which they’d been raised, and moved north in the 1820s. They became Quakers, like Moses Brown and his stepson, William J. Harris, who married Susan’s sister Emily. Emily and William’s children would come to know Moses well, and one of them, Ava, would be raised by Moses on his farm. When Emily asked for her to be returned, Moses refused, and willed her a good deal of his property—much of it gained in connection with cotton and slavery. At the same time, Winthrop and Hilton sent many letters to William, using their connections with the North to negotiate the sale of the lumber and cotton that the brothers produced down South. So, William was a Quaker, his wife was opposed to slavery, and yet they, too, profited from the trade of goods harvested, tended, or produced by enslaved people.
Harriet Wilson’s story, Our Nig, reinforces the truth of the North, that it, too, suffers from the shadow of slavery, both that which occurred on northern lands and that which was perpetuated by northerners with the trade of goods from southern lands and the West Indies. Her book was popular when it was released in 1859, but then disappeared from the record until it was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in the 1980s. If you didn’t know Gates already from his work as a historian, you knew him by 2008, when he was invited for a beer at the White House after being arrested for entering his own home in Cambridge; he was perceived by the police to be a burgling black man breaking into a fine home near the Ivy League university where he teaches. Wilson’s story still reverberates in our “free” North, the shadows still here.
There are other shadows, too, that I’d yet to learn. Tracing the story of the Great Swamp would lead me further back in time, to the founding of Rhode Island and the Narragansett and Wampanoag people who lived on this land before the colonists and enslaved Africans arrived.
9
Canuto Matanew
Havana, Havana, Havana. Barbados. Havana. West Indies, West Indies. Wes—. Indie—. Barbados. Carolyna. Havan—
In the shade of the porch at the house behind us, a group of men make concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow, restoring the old building to its original grandeur. It’s a hot day, over ninety degrees and humid, and the men, sweating under straw hats, mix the concrete with shovels, a rhythmic scraping sound, and then they gather it up and smooth it with brisk arcing sweeps onto the wall.
This is the Valle de los Ingenios, just outside Trinidad, Cuba, and a young man named Gonzalo Alfredo López Turiño leads me through an old sugar plantation that was abandoned in the late 1800s. Guinea hens chatter and flee from us as we approach the ruins of the slave quarters in the shade of the woods; the restoration hasn’t reached here yet, and the brick walls are only a few feet high, running in an even but dilapidated grid along the ground. Beyond, there’s a great twenty-foot-high brick wall with two wide holes in it. There were no windows in the slave quarters, says Gonzalo, just small rooms eight feet by twelve feet, each holding six to eight enslaved people.
“It’s basically a jail,” he says. “They don’t have any windows or beds. They just sleep on the dirt floor.”
A windowless brick dirt-floored room in this heat. This isn’t even a hot day, Gonzalo told me when I’d asked how he could wear jeans in this heat.
“It was a really hard life,” he says.
He tells me that the man who’s funding this restoration, which has been ongoing for fifteen years, wants to make an audio tour to teach people about each phase of the rum-distilling process, and about life here in the 1800s. The trick will be to limit the number of people who visit so they don’t trample over it, he says.
There’s a great black wasp perched on a branch nea
r the ground in front of us. It’s the largest bug I’ve ever seen, the size of a large mouse.
“Look,” Gonzalo points, fascinated.
“What is it?”
“Spider wasp,” he says. “I was stung by one years ago. The worst pain I ever had.”
The tarantula wasp has a stinger half an inch long, and will kill a tarantula, carry it back to its nest, and lay an egg in the tarantula’s underside so that the larvae can eat the tarantula’s innards until they hatch into adults. Spider wasps, they’re called. Gonzalo was in the army when he was stung by one of them, and it was one of the worst pains he’s ever felt.
“I had a fever for days,” he says. “It was terrible.”
I’m here to learn about the triangle trade, but the more I learn, the more it feels like a tangled crisscrossed web of commerce—rum, from sugar and molasses, traded for goods from the east, and for enslaved people on the coast of West Africa and in the West Indies, and for cheese and salted fish, and crisscrossing back and forth again and again, a vision of threaded switchbacks and knots across the Atlantic.
I go back to the stories of how this began, or how it was perpetuated, since it had been ongoing for centuries by the time the Crouch-Cushman-Williams families became involved. Christy Clark-Pujara writes:
By the mid-18th century, Rhode Island had become a permanent and prosperous colony, thanks to local investments in the business of slavery. Colonists supplied sugar plantations in the West Indies with slaves, livestock, dairy products, fish, candles, and lumber. In return, they received molasses which they distilled into rum. This trade began in the late 17th century but flourished after 1730, when rum became a major currency in the slave trade. The West Indian trade propelled Newport out of Boston’s shadow and into the status of a major city and helped to establish Providence as a major port.