The
blue waters of the Chesapeake lap against the shore. Sunbathers lounge
in deckchairs as black children and white children run and play on the
beach. And close by stands a magnificent oak tree, its trunk stretching
three great arms and canopies of leaves high into the tranquil sky.
Over half a millennium, the Algernoune Oak
has witnessed war and peace and the fall of empires, but never a day
like the one in late August 1619. It was here that the White Lion, a
160-ton English privateer ship, landed at what was then known as Point
Comfort. On board were more than 20 captives seized from the Kingdom of
Ndongo in Angola and transported across the Atlantic. This dislocated,
unwilling, violated group were the first enslaved Africans to set foot
in English North America – ushering in the era of slavery in what would
become the United States.
Advertisement
This site, now Fort Monroe in Hampton, southern Virginia,
will host a weekend of 400th anniversary commemorations on 23-25
August, culminating in a symbolic release of butterflies and nationwide
ringing of bells. Americans of all races will reflect on a historical
pivot point that illuminates pain and suffering but also resilience and
reinvention. Some see an opportunity for a national reckoning and debate
on reparations.
For a people robbed of an origins story, it is also an invitation to go in search of roots – the African in African American.
Terry Brown stands at the gate at Fort Monroe where the
first move towards emancipation occurred when enslaved men Frank Baker,
James Townsend and Shepard Mallory sought sanctuary during the civil
war. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/The Guardian
“Once I learned that I was from there it changed something in me,” said Terry E Brown,
50, who has traced his ancestry to Cameroon and enslaved people in
Virginia and North Carolina. “I have a fire in me to just learn about
why and who I am. There’s something deep down and spiritual about it and
I want to connect to it. I’m American, and I believe in this structure
that we have, but I’m emotionally and spiritually tied to Africa now
that I know where I came from.”
By the early 17th century the transatlantic slave trade
– the biggest forced migration of people in world history – was already
well under way in the Caribbean and Latin America. In 1619 it came to
the English colony of Virginia. The San Juan Bautista, a Spanish ship
transporting enslaved Africans, was bound for Mexico when it was
attacked by the White Lion and another privateer, the Treasurer, and
forced to surrender its African prisoners.
The White Lion continued on to land at Point Comfort. John Rolfe, a
colonist, reported that its cargo was “not anything but 20 and odd
Negroes, which the Governor and Cape Merchant bought for victualls”.
They were given names by Portuguese missionaries: Antony, Isabela,
William, Angela, Anthony, Frances, Margaret, Anthony, John, Edward,
Anthony and others, according to research by the Hampton History Museum.
The captain of the White Lion, John Jope, traded the captives to
Virginians in return for food and supplies. They were taken into
servitude in nearby homes and plantations, their skills as farmers and
artisans critical in the daily struggle to survive. Slavery in America was born.
Terry Brown, the first African American superintendent at
Fort Monroe national monument, stands by a 500-year-old tree which he
calls the Witness Tree. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/The Guardian
Yet it all requires a leap of imagination in the serenity of today’s 565-acre Fort Monroe national monument, run by the National Park Service, or in the low-key city of Hampton, home to Nasa’s Langley Research Center.
Advertisement
Brown,
the first black superintendent at Fort Monroe, said: “The early
colonists are trying to survive and they’re not doing it. They’re
resorting to cannibalism because they just can’t figure this thing out.
When the Africans show up, the game changes a little bit because they
knew how to cultivate rice, sugar and cotton, all those things were
perfect for this environment and for what they were trying to do.”
It would be another century until the formation of the United States. By
1725, some 42,200 enslaved Africans had been transported to the
Chesapeake; by 1775, the total was 127,200. Thomas Jefferson, the author
of the declaration of independence, which contains the words “all men
are created equal”, was a Virginia slave owner and, by 1860, the US was home to about 3.9 million enslaved African Americans.
The events of 1619 are at once both remote and immediate in a state
where white nationalists caused deadly violence in Charlottesville two
years ago and in a nation where their enabler occupies the White House.
Brown reflected: “African Americans make up about 13% of the
population and our young black men account for about 49% of America’s
murders. People who look like me, about 41% of them are sitting in a
jail cell. Now I can easily blame that on one thing but I can easily tie
it to the very beginning of this country. It’s so easy to treat other
people like they’re less than human if you don’t know them. So what I’m
hoping this 400th will do is raise the awareness level.
“We’re not going to change people’s behaviour overnight but maybe if
you sit back and think, ‘man, 400 years’, they were enslaved for 246
years so they lived under the most oppressive conditions imaginable but
they managed to reinvent themselves …They created new music and new art
forms and new families. It’s one of the greatest stories and it’s
amazing that they survived it.”
A Confederate statue in the center of a cemetery at St
John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Hampton, Virginia. Photograph:
Evelyn Hockstein/The Guardian
Last month, Donald Trump travelled to nearby Jamestown to celebrate
the 400th anniversary of the first representative legislative assembly.
The US president made reference to the first enslaved Africans’ arrival
in Virginia, “the beginning of a barbaric trade in human lives”, but there are currently no plans for him to attend the commemoration at Fort Monroe.
Advertisement
Gaylene Kanoyton, the president of the Hampton branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said:“He’s
not welcome because of everything that we’re commemorating, the arrival
of slavery. He’s for white supremacy, he’s for nationalism, he’s for
everything that we are against.”
Built by enslaved labour, the fort has a multilayered history, full
of contradiction and paradox, like America itself. It witnessed the
beginning of slavery but also the end: early in the civil war, three
enslaved men seeking freedom escaped to Fort Monroe and were deemed by
the commander as “contraband of war”, spurring thousands to seek
sanctuary behind Union lines and ultimately a shift in government policy
towards emancipation.
There are other threads from past to present. Among the Africans who
arrived on the White Lion were Anthony and Isabela who, in 1624 or 1625,
had a son, William, who was baptised. In a census they are identified
as “Antoney Negro: Isabell Negro: and William theire Child Baptised.”
They were living on the property of Captain William Tucker, so are now
known by this surname, and William is often described as the first
African child born in English North America.
A local family in Hampton believe they are his direct descendants.
Walter Jones, 63, whose mother is the oldest living Tucker, said: “We
traced as far as we could and then we had word-of-mouth records. We
heard this years and years ago and so a lot of us have been through
family history and we just never realized how significant it was. From
what we’re able to dig up, everything still points to that.”
Walter Jones (right) and his first cousin Verrandall
Tucker in the Tucker family cemetery in Hampton, Virginia, a two-acre
site in the Aberdeen Gardens neighborhood. Photograph: Evelyn
Hockstein/The Guardian
Jones and his relatives maintain a two-acre cemetery in the historic
African American neighborhood of Aberdeen Gardens in Hampton, where many
of their ancestors are buried. A simple grey monument is inscribed with
the words: “Tucker’s cemetery. First black family. 1619.” A short
distance away, a headstone says, “African American female. Approx age
60. Discovered July 2017.” Dozens of white crosses dot patches of grass
and soil representing unmarked graves.
Can Jones, a retired software engineer, forgive the enslavers? “The
way we were raised and the way I was raised is that we forgive all for
some of the things that were done because it wasn’t just them. It was
going on everywhere so it was unfortunate and in some cases Africans
were also involved in some of the slave trade.
“There’s more discord to not being recognised as being such a vital
part of our history and our nation’s history here and what was
contributed. We didn’t come here by choice but we chose to excel and to
build a country which wasn’t our own. So sometimes I think not having
that type of recognition makes you a little bitter. If it hasn’t come by
now, when will it? And now that it’s 400 years coming up, how many
people truly will even recognise that?”
The Tucker family cemetery has more than 104 markers,
with burials dating to the 1800s. The white crosses are unmarked graves
which were identified by ground penetrating radar. Photograph: Evelyn
Hockstein/The Guardian
The Tuckers are not alone. The anniversary coincides with a boom in online and TV genealogy. Donnie Tuck,
the mayor of Hampton, a majority African American city, took a DNA test
earlier this year and found lineage in Nigeria and other countries.
Advertisement
“Now
we look at progress and, with so many documentaries and programs where
you’re exploring what slaves went through and the civil war and the
period afterwards, I think there’s a whole new emphasis and we have more
resources available to us. There’a a real hunger among African
Americans to try and know our roots and our experience, our journey here
to America and even that whole journey for the last 400 years.”
Some have taken the curiosity further and travelled to Africa. Last
month, the congressman James Clyburn was part of a congressional
delegation to Ghana, led by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi,
that visited Cape Coast and Elmina castles to observe the 400th
anniversary. It was his second trip to the “door of no return”. “All I
remember the first time I went there was walking through that door and
looking out at the ocean and the impact that was,” he said in a phone
interview.
Clyburn believes that America has still not fully confronted the
issue of slavery. “It’s an issue that’s been avoided in this country as
much as possible. If it were an ongoing process I think that we would be
much further down the road on that. We continue to treat this whole
issue with what I like to call benign neglect. We tend to feel that if
we ignore it, pretend it didn’t happen, then it didn’t happen or if we
don’t need to do anything with it then we won’t.”
Mayor Donnie Tuck at the Hampton History Museum in an
exhibit commemorating the 1619 first arrival of Africans in
English-occupied North America. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/The
Guardian
A sign of America’s enduring strength is its ability to be self-aware
and self-critical. There has not been a truth and reconciliation
commission like that in South Africa after racial apartheid. But in June
a House of Representatives subcommittee heard debate over the legacy of slavery and the potential for reparations, a controversial concept now endorsed by many Democratic candidates for president.
Advertisement
Clyburn,
who is the House majority whip, commented: “It is impossible to
monetise this issue and I think it’s foolhardy to continue having that
discussion. We do know that it was illegal to educate slaves and the
states made it impossible to educate freed slaves. You make amends for
that by providing the education that you never provided and you do same
thing with all other entities that people have to navigate through
housing, community development.”
The proposal for a commission to study remedies is supported by Katrina Browne,
who testified at the congressional hearing that her ancestors, the
DeWolfs, were the biggest slave traders in American history. She was
“devastated” when she learned the family secret and does not excuse them
on grounds that they were people of their time.
“There were always people who were against it so, if during the
entire period of enslavement of Africans there were people who saw
clearly that it was evil and wrong, that tells me that anyone could have
seen that it was evil and wrong and they chose not to,” she said in a
phone interview.
Browne, 51, whose Emmy-nominated film, Traces of the Trade, follows her family’s reckoning with this past, now advances race dialogue in the Episcopal church.
Fort Monroe is the site of the landing of the first
enslaved Africans in English-occupied North America at Point Comfort in
1619. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/The Guardian
“African Americans have been incredibly wise and gracious. The anger
is more about the present and the stubbornness of whites in resisting
looking at the connection of the past to the present. It’s like they
want us to do our homework so we can understand how the past has shaped
the present.”
While the anniversary will put much emphasis on slavery, it is also a
moment to honor Africans in America and all their resistance,
creativity and ingenuity. Part of the re-excavation of this past is to
present a narrative not through the eyes of the English settlers but the
eyes of the enslaved – to humanize the dehumanized – and put it at the
centre of the American story. Dr Cassandra Newby-Alexander,
a history professor and the director of the Joseph Jenkins Roberts
Center for African Diaspora Studies at Norfolk State University in
nearby Norfolk, said:
“Back in 1970, Ralph Ellison wrote an article in Time magazine
entitled ‘What would America have been without the Negro?’ When I think
about 1619, it causes me to reflect on that question. What would
America be like without people of African descent? What would be the
same? Would even our definition of freedom be the same? Would our
understanding of something as simple as music be the same? Would our
language should be the same?”
No comments:
Post a Comment