Recaptured Africans

by Fett, Sharla M. ;

  SCARCITY, INSECURITY, AND ALLIANCES

  Though it may seem at first counterintuitive, recaptives also asserted social identities and forged shipmate relations through negotiation and disputes over food, berths, and sexual partners. In the zero-sum world of the transport ship, the young and the sick proved most vulnerable. Noticing the animated bartering that followed each meal, William Young observed, “Everyone tried to overreach his neighbor, and the strong generally fare the best.”111 Fights also broke out among recaptive passengers jammed into tight sleeping quarters.112 Two weeks into the journey, for example, one of the older adult men (said by his shipmates to have also killed others on the Wildfire’s middle passage) choked a younger man to death.113 To impose better order, the Castilian’s crew built a wooden bulkhead to divide the berths of adult men from the space designated for women, girls, and boys. “Great confusion ensued in the selection of berths,” Young noted.114 On the Niagara, hundreds of young recaptives without adult protection created their own alliances for security. A Frank Leslie’s correspondent noted divisions among the shipmates, observing “the boys, in particular, forming themselves into parties for mutual protection and defence [sic].”115 Groups of recaptive children fought over food supplies and blankets but also spent time playing during the long days at sea.116 While language and geographic origin probably contributed to the boundaries of these competing “parties” of recaptive youth, expressions of ethnic identity did not seem to be the primary means by which child recaptives formed bonds with one another.117 Rather, in the gender-segregated spaces of the Niagara, male youth turned to each other to secure the most basic resources for bodily survival.

  In contrast to the Niagara, among the older cohort of West African passengers on the Star of the Union, geography and homeland played a larger part in structuring shipmate relations. Evidence collected from government agents reflects the European perception of African “tribal” organization yet also suggests how recaptives’ political and linguistic affiliations shaped the nature of shipboard conflicts. For example, surgeon Grymes attributed “bitter hostilities” among the Ouidah-embarked shipmates to divisions between “three different tribes.” Exacerbated by constant proximity in tight ship spaces, differences of West African language, religion, status, and routes into enslavement could not easily be bridged. As previously discussed, survivors of the Bogota included Yoruba speakers captured by Dahomean soldiers but also some Fon speakers from Dahomey and Hausa as well.118 Discord and threats elicited discipline from several layers of shipboard authority, according to Grymes’s report. Quarrels over theft, noise, and “disregard of the hygienic regulations,” for instance, resulted in “a sound flogging with a rope’s end, by one of the headmen of their own tribe.” And when shipmates threatened fellow shipmates with murder, the captain ordered the aggressors put in irons and fed a diet of bread and water.119 Such divisions, while disrupting the peace of the voyage, nevertheless called upon social and political affiliations from the recaptives’ previous lives and drew men and women into new alliances for protection and survival. As Grymes also noted, “Many of them were related & they showed, many marks of interest and affection when any weal or woe, happened to one of their respective relatives or friends.”120 Presumably, older recaptives who had been fully initiated into their home societies as adults would have felt a greater stake in such identifications and thus sought to draw on affiliations of town, lineage, and other group identities. Such hostilities, while clearly posing individual dangers, revealed not an alienated, atomized group of captives but a vitally contesting gathering of shipmates whose members drew on past social identities to gain protection and confront enemies in the effort to survive their second ocean crossing.

  Rare evidence hints at hostility generated by contested sexual partnerships as a specific category of conflict among adults and maturing youth during the Liberian passages. For example, one evening when darkness had fallen over their ship, McCalla and Grymes heard “screams and loud language” below deck prompted by a fight between a woman called Princess (who traveled with her young child) and two men. The secondhand nature of its accounting obscures much of the meaning of the quarrel. However, McCalla wrote that in a subsequent hearing on deck, the contesting parties and witnesses pinned the outburst on one of the men, who had threatened to kill the woman and her child “because she wanted to spread her blanket near him.”121 Grymes, also on the Star of the Union, wrote that many of the “squabbles” among recaptives revolved around the “ladies” and violations of the gender-designated sleeping spaces.122 Regulation of sexual mores may have been what Captain Gorham had in mind when he officiated at the marriage of twenty-four shipmate couples in the third week of the Star of the Union’s voyage. Through the interpreter, the captain explained to each couple the principles of permanent and monogamous union to which the wedding ceremony bound them. To be sure, the captain’s stateroom ceremonies reflected prevailing Anglo-American notions of marriage as a civilizing institution, yet the weddings also signified an important social bond that would continue to play a part in shipmate networks in Liberia.123

  Throughout their journeys, shipmates of all ages also acted together to secure resources for themselves and shape the ship’s environment to their own ends. As McCalla’s discussion of Princess revealed, men and women crossed the boundaries of areas officially designated as gender-segregated spaces of the Star of the Union. The boys or young men punished for stealing bread on the Castilian used the cover of night to slip through the ship’s forward hatch and into the lower hold where provisions were stored.124 As earlier mentioned, Bomba disregarded the male nurse George by removing the young woman who had miscarried from the Castilian’s “hospital” area to the women’s quarters. In the first days of the Star of the Union’s voyage, men and women literally reshaped their physical surroundings by convincing James Grymes to jettison hundreds of pine-board berths and uncomfortable straw mattresses that added to the crowded and airless conditions between decks.125 From the empty cotton mattress ticks, recaptive shipmates then created clothing to replace or supplement the motley assortment of donated American clothing items, eliciting admiration from Grymes on the variety and “ingenuity” of their improvised designs.126 In these and other small daily acts, recaptive men and women collectively pushed back against the coercive constraints of transport ships. Their actions illuminated creativity and appropriation in the midst of scarcity as another element of recaptive politics of survival.

  SOOTHING, HEALING, AND SORCERY

  Through acts of appropriation and improvisation, recaptives sought to relieve their aching, itching, and malnourished bodies. Some of the most basic methods of relief could be practiced widely and without specialized skills. The same protracted deprivation under crowded and exposed conditions that led to blindness, edema, and dysentery also wreaked havoc on people’s skin. Fleas, chiggers, and lice tormented recaptives of all ages, who tended to one another’s scalps and skin to soothe their persistent itching.127 Dehydration cracked open dry lips, and malnutrition led to the ulceration of common sores.128 Something as simple as fat or oil brought relief by calming and softening the skin. Rather than drinking all their ration of castor oil, Grymes observed, African men and women reserved a portion for rubbing into their skin. One group of shipmates went so far as to dip into the cook’s “slush” barrel—a reservoir for meat fats and pork drippings—for use as an emollient.129 Such measures of physical relief could be shared widely across recaptive communities, but other afflictions had more specialized origins requiring greater expertise.

  Although forced voyages across the Atlantic cut off enslaved captives from familiar therapies and practitioners, some adult recaptives had apparently been trained and initiated as healers. Given the wide geographic regions represented by the four shipmate groups in this study, fragments of evidence revealing healing among recaptives can only be interpreted in general terms. Yet the evident desire of slave trade refugees to seek out healers among fellow shipm
ates illuminates the material and spatial politics of survival, as does the innovation required by ritual specialists to practice in exile. The government appointed white doctors who designated a ship hospital, but in truth, recaptive ships revealed an environment of medical pluralism that transcended designated medical spaces.130 On the Castilian, for example, Young observed a woman “making gashes with a razor on the swollen feet of a scurvy patient.”131 To an American doctor trained in humoral therapies of bleeding and purging, the opening of “anasarcous” (fluid-filled) limbs to relieve swelling seemed rational. Furthermore, Young correctly assumed this to be an “accustomed” remedy among the Castilian’s West Central African shipmates. In fact, Lower Congo nsamba (medicated incisions) reaching back at least to the nineteenth century, if not earlier, represented only part of a larger regional therapeutic intervention that involved an initiated practitioner (nganga nkisi) slicing shallow cuts into the skin, cupping the incisions with a horn, and inserting herbal medicines into the cutaneous openings.132 Equally important during such treatments, as anthropologist John Janzen has argued for twentieth-century Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo), the sufferer expected to be surrounded with kin who provided advice and practical support during treatment.133 Bomba and other recaptive women exercised a similar role in the case of their companion’s miscarriage. Ship doctors’ accounts of this and other medical crises expose the stark spaces in which recaptive healers and sufferers existed. Yet they also vividly show that interactions surrounding health and healing served as important sites for building shipmate social relations.

  Shipmate groups with a larger proportion of adults improved the likelihood that ritual specialists might be present to contribute to the healing resources of the shipmate community. The ethnic diversity of captives sold to the Bogota captain in Ouidah, for example, meant that Bogota shipmates could potentially include several different kinds of therapeutic practitioners. Among West African adult captives sold to nineteenth-century transatlantic slavers—and thus possibly in recaptive communities—could be found Yoruba babalowe, Fon- and Gbe-speaking initiates of particular vodun, Hausa bonesetters, and Muslim clerics specializing in protective amulets.134 On the Bogota, for example, McCalla recorded his observations of a “charm doctor” working over an ailing woman: “The man sat down beside the young woman rubbing the palms of his hands together and with his mouth close to them, he would mutter some cabalistic words—he would then blow and spit in his hands and put them around the woman’s body, drawing them tightly beginning at the backbone and bringing them around to the breasts and then make a gesture as if he had gathered a handful of ‘evil spirit’ which he threw away to one side.”135 Despite the biases of McCalla’s language, we can observe the improvised space in which the healer worked without access to necessary ritual family, materials, and dedicated spaces. As James Sweet’s study of the eighteenth-century healer Domingos Álvares shows, enslaved and exiled West African healers spent years struggling to re-create the “ritual symbolism and practice” of their homelands.136 McCalla’s observation offers a glimpse of a fragile and early example of such ritual reconstitution, in which the healer used his knowledge, hands, and breath to address the sufferer’s pain and sense of disorder.

  Other afflicted recaptives, however, remained cut off from specialists who could counter the threat of illness and wasting bodies. The two women mentioned previously as having been put in irons on the Niagara had come to blows over the question of a young child’s affliction. As the Frank Leslie’s correspondent put it, “The mother accused another woman of bewitching it; and using the arts of sorcery to destroy its life.” In the Loango and Kongo regions from which many of the Niagara’s passengers had been enslaved, witchcraft constituted the central framework for understanding maldistribution of resources, acquisition of wealth at the expense of others, and malevolent consumption of life. Witchcraft, Ralph Austen argues, served as “the immediate idiom” that best expressed the exploitive nature of transatlantic enslavement.137 Given the perils and misfortune of displacement from the Echo to Fort Sumter to the Niagara, it is entirely comprehensible that a recaptive West Central African mother would charge her fellow shipmate with witchcraft as her child’s life ebbed away. The point here, however, is that traveling among many boys and youth, these women most likely had no kin group and little chance of finding a ritual specialist who could mediate their disagreement, determine the source of the affliction, and offer a remedy. Although the Niagara’s records suggest that the baby did indeed reach Liberia alive, the ritual impoverishment of the naval steamer’s environment gave the unnamed mother few means by which to meaningfully address the social crisis of her child’s illness.138 By confronting her shipmate on the shared terrain of witchcraft accusation, this woman invoked a juridical system that would have been familiar to many of her shipmates, thus creating an improvised West Central African social world aboard the Niagara.

  BEAUTIFICATION AND BODY AESTHETICS

  While many recaptives waged their struggle for existence at the very threshold of death, the politics of survival also had an aesthetic dimension, where slave ship survivors reasserted corporate belonging through artistic creation. A compelling example appears in McCalla’s observation of a West African woman inscribing a new “tattoo” on her shipmate’s arms.

  I saw one of the women tattooing another one to-day. The performer took a razor and made incisions about three quarters of an inch long—and about the twelfth of an inch deep—at regular and fanciful intervals along the fore-arm of the other woman—who—though she bled a good deal did not wince or appear to suffer the least pain. After the cutting was finished—common grease or slush was rubbed freely over the arm—this was wiped off—then lemon juice applied and in a few minutes wiped off—and finally powdered charcoal—was rubbed over the arm and permitted to dry there. These substances so applied produce a slight irritation and a singularly raised and glossy scar is the result. All of the negroes are marked in some design to show their tribe and country. Some of them have the most elaborate designs over their backs, faces—arms, breasts—abdomen and legs—representing—leaves—vines—diamonds—squares, etc.139

  By stepping back to consider the broader significance of West African scarification, we can see that what McCalla perceived as a static sign of “tribe and country” is best understood as a significant act of political and social reclamation through bodily aesthetics.

  Across West Africa, cicatrization of the face and body communicated a dense network of social significance. Taken together, the location of the patterns, the quality of the work, the age at which a person acquired various marks, and the specificity of design indicated multiple kinds of corporate identification. Specific facial and body markings signified, among other meanings, nobility, social status, age class, subgroup identity, or political allegiance. As “citizenship symbols,” facial cicatrices distinguished stranger from resident, protected against enslavement, and sometimes gave evidence of a person having undergone specific curative rituals. Through scarification, one manifested one’s history and identity. Loss of a loved one, stages of betrothal, and signs of initiation could all be read in artistically modified surfaces of the skin.140 So nuanced were the meanings embedded through facial patterns, in particular, that Yoruba speakers used different verbs to designate different ways of being marked.141

  Using McCalla’s description in combination with a careful reading of contemporary anthropological writing on Yoruba scarification, one possible interpretation of what McCalla saw is the application of aesthetic marks known in contemporary Yoruba as kóló, a series of “closely spaced hatch marks” made primarily (but not exclusively) for women on many parts of the body, including the upper and lower arms.142 In observations by anthropologist Henry John Drewal among Ohori and Egbado Yoruba during the 1970s, the body artist achieved the distinct “cicatrice designs” of kóló in much the same manner observed by McCalla, though inserting a “colorant (usually charcoal or lampblack)” into the cut
s.143 According to Drewal, “The emphasis [of kóló] is clearly on the visible display of the enhanced and beautified human body.”144 Furthermore, such acts of beautification should not be considered mere surface indulgences, for kóló carried with it moral and transformative implications as well. The raised patterns visually confirmed a woman’s strength in the face of pain, and the rippled surface offered sensual pleasure to the touch of a lover.145 Although we cannot, of course, be certain of the meanings for these recaptive women, further consideration of kóló within the tradition of Yoruba scarification can unfold the profound significance of recaptive body artistry.146

  If, indeed, McCalla witnessed the creation of kóló marks, he unwittingly documented the duality of continuity and innovation among recaptive artistic practice in forced migration. Because of the specialized iron instruments used in scarification, Yoruba body art had close associations with the orisha Ogún. The specially initiated Yoruba practitioners described by Drewal used a ritually consecrated, delicate Y-shaped iron blade to carve the fine lines of kóló into the skin.147 No such precisely crafted tools existed on the Star of the Union, however. Instead, McCalla described how the practitioner used a simple straight razor to make her marks. McCalla’s co-physician, James Grymes, added that recaptives used “the blade of a razor, knife, a shell or any sharp instrument” to make their marks.148 Charcoal, lemon, and grease would presumably have been obtained from the ship’s galley, possibly suggesting exchange with the crew or appropriation of supplies, as with the cook’s slush barrel for skin ointment. The improvisation may have extended as far as the female gender of the practitioner. Due to its connection to Ogún, Yoruba-speaking societies reserved body artistry with few exceptions to male practitioners (oloola).149