Well might the victims of this tragic oppression look heavenward and wonder, like the Egyptian-imprisoned Israelites of old, if a loving God existed at all. If so, why he had forgotten them. But their Father saw the misery that man inflicted upon man, and held the anguished cry of each slave-child in his own grieved heart. He had not forgotten them, and would send others, his servants, to put an end to their despair.
Tens of thousands of African slaves were bought and sold in the Caribbean islands of the New World through the 1500s. When the seventeenth century opened, however, slavery still had not come to the mainland of the North American continent.
It was accidental irony, not design, that finally brought slavery to the English colonies.
The ship carrying Chief Tungal and his dark-skinned brothers and children away from their homeland bore for the West Indies of the Caribbean. There its Portuguese captain hoped to turn a handsome profit for his cargo with Spanish plantation owners.
Only a week across the Atlantic, however, a violent storm threw him badly off course. Scarcely had he recovered from it before another assaulted them, and then a third. Badly damaged and too crippled to right itself, the Vidonia was driven far to the north. Its fate, in one of the tragic twists of history, now lay at the mercy of the winds.
Whether the winds were kind or cruel in blowing them into the path of another vessel prowling the Atlantic’s northern waters would depend on the color of one’s skin.
It was the Vidonia’s lookout atop the crow’s nest who first saw the sail on the horizon.
“Ship sighted… starboard stern!” cried the sentinel in Portuguese. “Rouse the captain!”
The captain hurried on deck, spyglass in hand, followed by three of his men. The grim expression on all their faces moments later told the story. The flag snapping from the stalking masthead carried no nation’s colors. An unmarked ship could mean but one thing.
Pirates!
“All hands on deck!” called the captain. “Run up every sail… roll out the cannon… prepare for battle!”
In its crippled condition, the Vidonia could not hope to outrun its pursuer. The unmarked vessel was a Dutch man-of-war, trim and fleet, unburdened by cargo and gaining steadily.
In less than an hour, the seasoned crew of Dutchmen could be seen scurrying about on deck making ready for a fight. Gradually the ships drew even.
In the blackness below, Chief Tungal knew nothing of the battle that followed, only that a barrage of explosions, loud as thunder, violently shook the ship. As the sides of the wooden hold groaned, screams echoed from the prisoners trapped in darkness.
Gunfire… shouts from above… more explosions… the sounds of wood cracking and splintering… suddenly a flood of light burst upon them. Icy salt water rushed between the decks where Tungal and his fellow captives struggled in vain with the ropes that bound them. The Vidonia heaved and began to list to one side.
Screams, more desperate now, rose in every direction from white and black alike. Suddenly a trapdoor opened above them. Strangers, white of skin like their captors but yelling commands in yet another unfamiliar tongue, leaped down into the seething clamor of the bowels of the sinking ship. Frantically, as they were able, they sliced the ropes of those within reach, gathered what rich bundles of ivory they could carry, and urged those they had loosed up on deck. The Africans fortunate enough to be freed, water swirling now above their knees, scrambled after them, desperate to save themselves.
Finding his own ropes dangling loose, Tungal turned back, fighting the flow of escapees. In a loud voice he called to his children. But he could not make his way back below deck against the human tide before a heavy blow knocked him senseless.
As his consciousness returned, Tungal lay rocking gently back and forth in a hammock of hemp. Slowly his vision came into focus. He was staring up at the tarred underside of a wooden deck. The smell and sway of creaking wood told him he was still inside the lower portions of a ship.
With difficulty he tried to pull himself up. Beside him, a pale-skinned foreigner in the next hammock turned toward him and spoke in a strange tongue. Tungal stared back uncomprehending. He glanced about at the empty berths lining the walls, and at the rows of mostly empty hammocks swinging from hooks in the low ceiling.
Where was he, Tungal thought. This was not the ship that had carried him away from Africa. Slowly the events of the attack and the confusion that followed came back to him.
Startled in the midst of his reverie, a small black hand slid over Tungal’s arm. He turned, and gasped with astonished delight. His youngest daughter crept beside him. Her two older sisters and two brothers stood behind her! Great smiles spread over the five black faces to see their father’s eyes open at last in wakeful recognition. None of them wore ropes or chains.
The white stranger spoke again, though they still did not understand him.
“We are bounde, ye and we twelve immigrants, my goode dark-skinned brother,” he said in the English tongue Tungal and his kind would adopt in time as their own, “for the colonie in Virginia called Jamestowne. It is in the New Worlde. We are bounde as servants to worke for our freedom, as will ye, I am thinking.”
Their captors and rescuers were not pirates at all, but a ragged crew of Dutch and English smugglers who carried on a fitful trade between the Old World and the New. They had captured the Vidonia, but had only managed to bring twenty or so of the Africans on board before it sank and what remained of its crew and cargo was lost. It was the hope of the Dutchmen to purchase fresh supplies from the Jamestown colonists in exchange for their cargo of servants and ivory. The new freight of blacks would perhaps increase their bargaining power. Whether the colonists would want them they had no way of knowing. There had never before been Africans in Jamestown.
Until the ship arrived on the American continent, the African tribesmen and the white servants could do as they pleased.
Tungal did not understand the words. But he understood the man’s smile.
For now at least, he and his children were free.
Dispersion
1619–1808
When the Dutch man-of-war unloaded its goods at Jamestown, the colonists gaped with astonishment and curiosity at the twenty-one blacks walking silently down the gangplank. They had read about the existence of dark-skinned races of men. But never with their own eyes had they beheld their like before.
Though profit-seeking English seamen had eventually become involved in the Caribbean slave trade along with the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, the religiously minded English Puritans who settled along the eastern seaboard of the American mainland would have disdained the very idea of slavery. No Englishman owned another human being as his permanent property anywhere in England or in the new English colonies of the Americas. Indentured servitude, on the other hand, was a well-known means by which a man without money might offer his services for a given term of years in exchange for passage to the New World and subsequent freedom. During the period of his service he was provided a home, food, and clothing. After seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years, as the bargain was struck, he was given a sum of money to buy land and start his own life as a free man.
In the negotiations that followed the arrival of Chief Tungal and his fellow Africans, therefore, neither opportunistic Dutchmen nor English settlers considered themselves bargaining for the sale of slaves. The colonists purchased the Negroes, along with the new arrivals from Europe, as temporary servants, to be given the same rights as the indentured whites.
Tungal and his five children and their fifteen fellow Africans stepped onto the soil of the colony known as Virginia, indentured to their new English masters. They were the first permanent Negro settlers on the continent of America. They would not be the last.
Chief Tungal found himself indentured to a Jamestown Englishman by the name of Shaw. Between his scanty grasp of the English tongue and his master’s gentle persistence, he was finally made to understand that he would have a house and land of his own if
he and his daughter worked for Mr. Shaw for seven harvests. In some bewilderment, though without a great deal of say in the matter, Tungal agreed.
His youngest daughter remained with him and became part of the Shaw family. The other two daughters and two sons went to others in the struggling young colony. As in most cases of indenture, they were fairly and kindly treated as illiterate apprentices who were considered members of the extended household.
Before he could complete his seven years of service, however, Chief Tungal’s health failed him. Only his youngest daughter Unanana was with him at the end. His final words in the old tongue, as he laid the royal blessing upon her, pierced the young woman’s heart. “You are the last of my own,” he said, struggling with great effort, pausing to draw one labored breath after another. “My eyes grow dim…. I cannot see the future. I fear you will never return to our homeland. Perhaps your children… but you must remember… do not forget our heritage.”
“I will remember, Papa,” she said with tears in her eyes.
“As the rivers run through our land,” the weary black chieftain continued in a scarcely audible voice, “the five ancient rivers… the blood of ancient kings… take strength… do not forget the rivers and the old tales… the land. You come from…”
His voice faded. He struggled to lift his left hand, palm outward. Unanana reached her right up to join it.
“…the blood of kings flows in my body,” said Unanana in a choked voice. “I will remember. I will tell my children of the five rivers, and of the land, and teach them to teach their children.”
Tungal smiled weakly and dropped his arm to his side in the bed where he lay. He could pass content into the mystical invisible land of his fathers. He knew the ancient legacy of his people would live on.
By nightfall he was gone.
To complete her father’s indenture, Unanana agreed to work for the Shaws another seven years. Master and Mistress Shaw treated her kindly, helping her learn their English tongue and customs. Before the end of her own indenture, Unanana had married the Shaws’ son and had a house to call her own.
From Jamestown, Unanana’s brothers and sisters drifted out across the untamed new land. As the indenture of each was complete, with husbands and wives and families, they spread out yet farther in the intervening years. Their sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters after them married whites, fellow Africans, and also those from native Indian tribes. They dispersed, intermarried, lost track of their past, and became a new race of African-Americans. Memories of their former homeland dimmed. But many taught their children to cling to the fragmentary words their father had taught them as a lasting legacy to their royal ancestry and the former life they had left behind.
Tungal’s oldest son Goto traveled north, drawn by a love of the sea, and became a fisherman off the French Canadian coast. His reclusive habits earned him the nickname D’Solitaire. He took a native-born wife late in life from the Algonquin tribe, and passed on his proclivity to solitude to sons and grandchildren. Their seed spread along the northern coast and inland toward the region that would later be known as Quebec.
The next, a daughter called Kabel who came to be called Isobel, married a Frenchman. Their granddaughter moved deep into the French territory in the environs where a town called New Orleans would one day take root, and there her descendents remained, spreading throughout what would later become Louisiana and Mississippi.
The next daughter, Danyawo, found work in a settlement in Pennsylvania, married another indentured African, and adopted the name of their Pennsylvania master, Albright. Her grandson converted to the new Quaker faith under the influence of William Penn, and his sons and daughters drifted south into southern Virginia, westward to Ohio, while some remained in Pennsylvania.
The remaining son, Magoda, who came to be called Moses, grew skilled at smithy work. He traveled widely plying his trade, which he taught to his son, and he to his son after him. Within several generations his descendents had settled in the Indian wilds, and within several more generations his African descendents could be traced from the Carolinas to Georgia, and to the lands future great-grandsons would till for their Alabama masters.
Though each of Tungal’s children who had arrived with him at the English settlement all eventually gained their freedom, their descendants were not so fortunate to retain it. Perhaps thinking it in their best interests, many masters simply continued to provide for their blacks as they had, keeping them as servants beyond the originally specified term. The motives of the masters in so doing were not entirely cruel. They saw an extension of the period of service as the most sensible, even humane, way of taking care of a backward and illiterate native people who, in the whites’ eyes, were culturally incapable of owning farms and businesses and incorporating into English culture on their own.
By the time the two sons and three daughters of Tungal had lived out their days, the Jamestown colony where they had landed declared all Negroes perpetual servants. Other English colonies followed its example, adding regulations that steadily took away the rights of blacks.
Whatever had been the intent of such changes in the beginning, and as the staunchly religious attitudes of the original Puritans gave way to more self-serving economic and capitalistic motives, more rights continued to be taken from them. Gradually, Virginia’s blacks passed from indentured servants to perpetual servants and finally to slaves.
Following what had begun with the Portuguese and Spanish far to the south, the commerce in human flesh expanded and grew profitable in the English colonies as well. Slave ships began to haunt the eastern seaboard with increasing frequency. A new slave market was gradually born that proved even more lucrative than the former marketplaces of Arabia, the West Indies, and that flourishing in the New World’s first city, Spanish St. Augustine in Florida.
A travesty in mankind’s history had begun.
By late in that same seventeenth century, any African unfortunate enough to land on the shores of the New World, whether in Florida or Virginia, could expect a lifetime of drudgery, the length of which would depend on the strength of his constitution and the benevolence of his master.
As the French spread through the northern provinces of the continent now known as America, as the English continued to populate its middle regions of the Atlantic seaboard, and as the Spanish added to their settlements in the south, each brought its own unique form of European custom and language to displace those of native tribes. Slavery accompanied them all and was soon a fixture of life.
The plight of Africans in the New World grew more deplorable. All pretence of indentured servitude had long since vanished. Even those who managed, through the grace of an occasional benevolent white master, to earn, buy, or inherit their freedom had no guarantee of keeping it.
In Virginia, the descendants of Tungal’s youngest daughter Unanana Shaw found small comfort that they bore the white man’s name. Indeed, most were now known by the name of their masters. The names and legacies of their own ancestors had disappeared in the fading mists of the past. Their dark skin disguised whatever claims of mixed ancestry they might have raised. They worked the very land some of their great-great-grandparents had owned. Those few who recalled stories of their royal heritage shared it with their children and grandchildren as a slowly fading memory. They said the tales that came from the lost old books of time were important. Thus they passed on words they scarcely understood, from father to son and mother to daughter. Perhaps future generations would find better days in which again to recall their heritage.
Theirs was a doleful life. Tobacco flourished in the fields of Virginia. Cotton increased throughout the South as a profitable cash crop. Plantation owners worked their slaves to the last ounce of their strength.
Stoically Tungal’s descendents endured their miserable lot until the time came when the dream of freedom would awaken within their collective soul.
The colonies of the New World went to war in 1776 against their English forebears,
basing their struggle for independence on the bold pronouncement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was a foundation for nationhood, conceived and immortalized by landholding and slave-owning Europeans. It would take successive generations, however, to awaken the national consciousness to the imperative of the words of the nation’s founders to the all men of which the new nation was comprised.
For now there were whites and there were blacks and there were natives with skins of brown. They were anything but equal.
As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the demand for slave labor waned. But the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 exploded the market for cotton throughout the South. Suddenly, with enough cheap labor, it was a crop to make men wealthy beyond their dreams. Overnight, it seemed, the slave trade from the shores of Africa mushroomed. Slavery, which had till then been far more heavily concentrated in Virginia than any other Southern state, now spread toward Kentucky and Tennessee and Louisiana like a brush fire before a hot wind. Within a generation its blight bound together the southern portion of that nation calling itself the United States of America with an economic and cultural grip that would not easily be broken.
The thirteen states that made up the original Union interpreted the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution differently. The northern states, where slavery was neither prevalent nor a serious economic concern, began to ban slavery. The southern states, however, whose economies because of King Cotton had grown dependent on it, declared slavery legal. As the United States was a national government founded on the basis of the rights of states to make the majority of their own laws, so it remained. Each state determined for itself the status and rights of the three races which now comprised their populations—the European whites, the African blacks, and those of the native tribes now universally called Indians. All three were Americans, but they cherished distinct and discordant dreams of what that national name meant… and should mean.
American Dreams Trilogy Page 2