The Other Madisons

by Bettye Kearse

  Standing there, as I began to work through some of the shock and pain of that day, I realized I had gained an understanding of why the griots of West Africa are so necessary. Through oral history and family keepsakes, our African ancestors are not mere phantoms. They are alive in the stories told from generation to generation, in the letters and documents kept in family Bibles, in photographs inside old cardboard boxes, and in slide-show images on makeshift screens. They are alive in the ambitions, perceptions, beliefs, and values of their descendants, the people who are the evidence of what happened to the stolen Africans who survived. I would become the griotte for those families as well.

  Alone in the growing darkness, I recalled hearing a report that sea-eroded beads, thought to have been worn by Africans whose dead bodies were thrown off ships en route to the New World, had washed up on the shores of West Africa. I envisioned a path of red beads undulating with the currents on the ocean floor and tracing the Middle Passage from West Africa to America, the path Mandy had followed from Ghana to Virginia. The beads were like the red line on the map that had led Lee and me to the concession stand, and they reminded me of the blood Africans spilled in their homeland, in the sea, and in the New World. Beads were among what little the captives could hold on to when they left behind everything that had filled their lives: music, dances, customs, ceremonies, friends, families, and lovers. The glow and heat of the sun over Africa. The caress of their own soil on their hands and feet. The anticipation of a familiar tomorrow. The sea-worn beads begged to have their stories told.

  Soon after I returned from Portugal, I went to the library to learn what had become of the stockades. The updated edition of our guidebook made no mention of the stockades and their iron posts. I could not find a morsel of information. The erasure was complete.

  9

  The Castle

  The blue of the African sky was the most perfect color God ever made. The air was so clear and the sunlight danced so brightly off the ocean, I felt as though I were standing inside a crystal. Where the ocean swept over beach, the soft golden sand became firm and copper-colored. I ventured into the water, and it curled over my feet, soothing away the heat of that African day. I stepped back onto the dry sand and turned to watch the water gather up my wet footprints, taking them into the ocean’s depths, disappearing westward—as others had gone. In the distance, one cloud floated from the west—as I had come. It was 1995, two years after my first trip to Virginia, and I was in Ghana with a group from my church. My aim was to trace Mandy’s footsteps from Africa to America.

  I stood on the shore, my shoulders hot under the powerful rays of the sun, and looked up at Elmina Castle. It stretched along the shore and rose out of the rocks like a white crown, its series of spires and tiers of walls and balconies embellished with arches and studded with cannons. Long canoes painted with bright colors in bold designs crowded into the small harbor alive with voices, music, and fish in nets flopping against the boats. Beautiful in spite of its history: Elmina, Ghana.

  From the fifth to the eleventh centuries, Islamic merchants referred to the empire of Ghana as the “Land of Gold.” The name Elmina comes from the Portuguese words a mina de ouro, “the gold mine.” It was probably during the Netherlands’ control of the area, 1637 to 1872, that the labyrinthine complex of cave-like rooms took on the appellation castle, a derivative of the Latin word castellum, meaning “fortress.” Under British rule, from 1872 to 1957, the West African colony was known as the Gold Coast; in 1957, the region gained its independence and took back its ancient name, Ghana.

  When Portuguese explorers reached Ghana in 1471, they were greeted by natives adorned with gold jewelry. These upper-class Africans owned slaves. Slavery was an accepted social institution throughout Africa, but the slaves were usually prisoners of war, debtors, or convicts, and their enslavement was neither perpetual nor heritable.

  Initially, Portuguese bounty hunters traveled relatively short distances inland to abduct or purchase natives to sell in Elmina, but when the demand for slaves expanded, the Portuguese, with the aid of African henchmen, began to kidnap natives throughout West Africa for transport to Europe and, soon, to the New World.

  When the Portuguese proposed building a permanent base in Elmina, the local chief, Caramança, tried to discourage the plan. Nonetheless, in 1482, Portuguese soldiers hoisted the flag of Portugal and banners of the Catholic Church. Pope Nicholas V had issued Romanus Pontifex in 1454, a decree that granted Portugal’s King Afonso V the right “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all . . . enemies of Christ . . . and all . . . goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Under this authority, Portuguese soldiers claimed African territories and forced captives to swear allegiance to Portugal, renounce Islam and traditional African religions, and convert to Christianity or be made slaves. Under duress, Caramança accepted the sovereignty of the Christian God. The edifice that became the hub of Portugal’s slave trade was originally called São Jorge da Mina, named for Saint George, the patron saint of Portugal—and the saint of those who suffer.

  Some newly captured slaves were made to walk hundreds of miles to Elmina; others were brought in boats along rivers or up the coast. Within a decade, at least ten thousand African men, women, and children, many branded with a cross, became prisoners in the fortress. Some young people came willingly; their parents thought they were putting their offspring in the hands of benefactors who would take the children to lands where they could have better lives.

  In 1637, the Netherlands, with tactical assistance from Africans eager to rid themselves of the Portuguese, captured Elmina. Little did the Africans know that the Dutch would be far more oppressive than the Portuguese and would take the transatlantic slave trade to its zenith.

  When I walked through the entry into the central courtyard, the buildings, briefly, seemed majestic. Graceful balconies offered sweeping views of the ocean, and shady porticos granted relief from the sun. The large square was open to the sky, but I felt closed in. Everywhere I looked, I saw crumbling plaster walls, interrupted high above me by rows of windows, black and opaque from where I stood on the cobblestones below. Along the walls, dozens of cannons pointing in all directions stood at the ready, stacks of cannonballs nearby.

  In the central courtyard, I joined a group of visitors from distant parts of the world. I was surprised when our guide, in his melodic, punctuated baritone, informed us that the building at the center, with its square façade and square windows, was a church, the first Catholic church in sub-Saharan Africa. When the Protestant Dutch took over, they refused to worship in a Catholic church and used the building to buy and sell goods and slaves. These new occupants built a church of their own, a Protestant Dutch Reformed church, on a higher level of the castle.

  Although this Catholic church had lost its function as the center of religious life at the fort more than three hundred and fifty years before my visit, its presence felt starkly at odds with Elmina’s brutal role in the slave trade. In the system of dark tunnels and dungeons below the church, thousands upon thousands of Africans had been chained, beaten, starved, and herded like cattle before they were loaded onto ships that would carry them to enslavement in the New World—if they survived the Middle Passage.

  Near the church there was a tiny cell that had been set aside for slaves who had been condemned to death, most often men who resisted captivity. There were only a handful of us on the tour, but when the heavy door slammed shut behind us, enclosing us in utter darkness, I felt crushed among hundreds of bodies. The sound of each person’s breath echoed hollow in the tight room.

  In the dark, our tour guide revealed what had happened here. Ten or twelve men at a time, he said almost in a whisper, were whipped, bludgeoned, shackled, and then dragged into this cell. The door was locked. No food, no water. Every few days, armed guards would look through a small opening to check the condition of the prisoners. Still no food, no water. The guards came bac
k until, finally every prisoner was dead. Our docent’s soft, rhythmic voice was like a hymn of mourning wafting from the church across the plaza.

  On the other side of the courtyard there had been a holding area for female captives. The guide pointed up to a balcony and told us of a “tradition” at Elmina: Because there were few European prostitutes in Africa, when a white man wanted women, he chose one of the female captives. The Dutch governor of Elmina had first choice. He would order his soldiers to bring a group of prospects to the area of the courtyard below his living quarters. These were among the few times the women could leave the cells, and at first, they might have welcomed a breath of clean air and a view of the sky, a reprieve from the dungeons’ stench and darkness.

  The governor would step onto his balcony, survey the women below, and point to the one he wanted. With everyone looking on, guards dunked the chosen woman, again and again, in the rectangular cistern of water at the center of the courtyard until she was clean enough for the governor to touch. Then the guards pushed and prodded her up a ladder and through a trapdoor that opened directly into the governor’s bedroom above. The trapdoor closed and locked.

  When the governor had satisfied his needs, the woman was isolated in a cell for a month. If she had become pregnant, she was taken back to her village or one nearby. Perhaps she believed that this time, she truly had earned a reprieve. The woman might not have known that a few years later, the guards would come to the village to take her and her child into captivity.

  I stood in the courtyard, imagining myself naked and huddled among a score of African women. We were all thin and weak following days of hunger and thirst. Our bodies were tall or petite, narrow- or broad-hipped. Our breasts were small, full, erect, or flaccid. Our faces were round or slender, our foreheads low or high. Our cheeks were smooth or cut with tribal markings. Some of us cried; others frowned; some cowered and trembled. Some of us tried to hide our nakedness; others knew trying to hide was useless. Some had short-cropped hair; others had rows of braids; some had beads laced into intricate hair designs. Our beads were yellow or blue or green or orange or, like Mandy’s, they were red.

  The docent led me and the other tourists through a doorway that opened into a cave-like room. The air was sour, musty, and moldy. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I realized bats, perhaps a hundred, hung from the arched ceiling. I must have looked alarmed because the guide assured me they were harmless. He called the area around us “the room of deep sorrow.” He extended his arms toward the black openings on opposite sides of where we stood and told us these were the entrances to tunnels. One led to the men’s dungeons, the other to the women’s. In this room, men and women said goodbye. Here, husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, and mothers and sons were separated. Most never saw one another again. The anguish, the fear, the sense of loss, and the sorrow all lodged in my chest.

  Through somber light and looming shadows, we followed one of the damp tunnels to a narrow stairwell that ended in the dungeons below. Along a dimly lit corridor, a succession of arches opened into the female quarters. Originally storerooms, the guide explained, each windowless space could hold one hundred and fifty to three hundred women. Often, they had to stand for days or, sometimes, weeks at a time, skin to skin, mired in feces, urine, vomit, pus, tears, and menstrual blood. Many would die here.

  When the time came to board the ship, the women who had survived were led through an interconnecting series of rooms to a final chamber that offered the only sunlight many had seen for weeks. Blinded by the light, the women entered a narrow, gated egress that led to the beach. The intensely blue sky draped over their heads, and maybe the women glimpsed loved ones as their eyes adjusted to the brightness.

  They had stumbled through, crawled through, or fallen through the Gate of No Return. And there, they could feel something familiar under their feet—African sand. Only moments later, the sensation was lost forever. The ocean wiped away their footprints.

  10

  The Museum

  You have to come down here. There’s a slave ship in Baltimore. Don’t do another thing until you see it,” my friend Bonnie insisted over the phone.

  “A slave ship? Really?” I asked.

  “I could say it’s just a replica, but it feels real—too real, actually. I could try to describe it, but you need to see for yourself. The ship’s in a museum. We can go together. I want to be with you.”

  After Elmina, I wasn’t sure I was up to visiting even a replica of a slave ship, but I knew I had to go. I was glad I would be going with Bonnie. When a mutual friend introduced us several years earlier, Bonnie and I felt as if we had grown up together, though we had different interests. She was a nurse who loved poetry, painting, gourmet cooking, interior decorating, and flower arranging; I was a pediatrician who enjoyed dancing, gardening, writing, reading, and collecting arts and crafts. Soon after that first meeting, we started calling each other “sister.”

  Two weeks after’s Bonnie’s invitation, on a Saturday afternoon, I arrived in Maryland. As she drove me from the airport to her home in Bowie, snow began to fall thick onto the roads. It swept across the windows as the car crept along, its wipers whipping back and forth and its tires slipping. Bonnie turned up the radio. The announcer stated that the airport would soon shut down and that many highways were already closed. We followed a snowplow down the side roads and finally reached her house.

  The following morning revealed a white-blanketed town. I assumed we were snowed in. “No museum for us this trip,” I said, knowing I had patients to take care of the following Monday.

  Bonnie, her hands on her hips, said, “Forget the weather. Don’t be a chicken.”

  Don’t be a chicken was not exactly eloquent, but I gave in. While Bonnie and I bundled up in coats, scarves, gloves, and boots, her husband, Curtis, warmed up the car. As we started to pull away, Curtis asked through the open window, “Bonnie, are you sure the museum isn’t closed?”

  “It better not be,” she responded, backing out of the driveway.

  “Why don’t you call first?” Curtis shouted. A concerned look on his face, he waved goodbye.

  After crunching and sliding over some twenty-seven miles of icy roads and taking several detours, Bonnie and I reached the museum. It was open. Located in a renovated firehouse on Baltimore’s east side, the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum is a source of pride for the surrounding inner-city neighborhood. The exhibits depict black people from the time of ancient Africa through the modern civil rights movement and up to the present, showcasing the significant contributions made by men and women of African heritage throughout the world. Each wax figure has been researched to replicate facial expressions, posture, dress, jewelry, and various accoutrements. The museum’s slogan is “Taking you through the pages of time.”

  Bonnie guided me toward the slave ship. Plaques on the anteroom walls explained what happened before the voyage: Merchant representatives and members of the crew stripped the prisoners bare for inspection. Mouths were pried open, limbs were manipulated, backs were jabbed, and genitals were palpated. Red-hot brands were pressed to the chests, breasts, legs, arms, backs, or hands of the captives who passed scrutiny. The letters and numbers indicated the individuals who had delivered the slaves and the ships that would carry them away. A subsequent branding designated the trading company that had purchased the cargo. Later, these markings were used to identify slaves in records of sales, legal documents, and official proceedings. Names were irrelevant.

  Prisoners with any infirmity or deformity were decapitated. In the wax museum, a disembodied head hung from a pole.

  Though disconcerted, I moved on, Bonnie close behind. As we crossed a plank and descended a stairway, a recorded voice announced, “Here’s our next group. Looks like a healthy bunch.” We were to imagine ourselves as prisoners like Mandy or the other tens of millions of Africans herded onto ships that made some forty thousand transatlantic voyages.

  My voyage began. A cacophony of wat
er splashing against the ship, the clanging bell, creaking hull, scraping chains, screams, coughs, retching, sobs, and deep, agonal moans echoed through the stuffy room. I knew the sounds were taped, but the walls seemed to press in on me.

  Bonnie guided me to the first exhibit. I was not prepared. A fully clad white man, his fist raised, his face contorted with malice and lust, loomed over a naked black woman. The ruffle of his shirt cuff dangled above her face. The captive’s eyes and mouth were open wide with terror. Her outstretched hands pleaded for mercy.

  The scene before me had happened thousands of times aboard slave ships, but in this frozen moment, the man did not thrust himself into the woman’s body. He did not rip open her rectum or gag her with semen. He did not bloody her nose and mouth with his fists or pierce her breasts with his teeth. He did not slap her into unconsciousness. He simply hovered. Yet in my mind, I saw each brutal act; I heard the woman’s screams, the thuds to her pelvis and buttocks; I smelled the nauseating, incongruously sweet scent of blood. I felt as if I, too, were suspended in time, destined to stand less than three feet from this rape for eternity. Or, two centuries earlier, I might have been that woman. I could not turn away.

  Bonnie wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I had not realized I was shaking. After several moments, we moved on to the next scene, a row of boys, chained together, sitting in a narrow, isolated alcove. Their mouths hung open. Tears pooled in their eyes. Shining drops lingered on their cheeks.