Africatown, Alabama

One benefit to being temporarily stuck Stateside is that I have had a chance to catch up a bit on my reading. Most of my reading has, naturally, centered on Russia. But I have also had the opportunity to read a couple of titles on one of my favorite topics, African-American slavery in the United States.

My most recent read in this vein is Sylvanie A. Diouf's Dreams of Africa in Alabama. Diouf, who currently serves as curator for New York's Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, takes as her topic the fate of the Africans who were spirited into the United States aboard the Clotilda, the last slave ship ever brought to American shores. The Clotilda landed on the eve of the Civil War--in 1861.

Sadly, and shockingly, the transatlantic slave trade did not end when Congress ended the slave trade in 1808. Africans continued to be enslaved and brought through the harrowing Middle Passage to the Eastern United States under cover of darkness and sometimes with the complicity of the very officials who were supposed to suppress the trade. Moreover, if a slave ship made it across the Atlantic and was caught, the law did not require that the slaves be repatriated but rather that they be sold at auction, with half the proceeds going to the government and half to any informer involved in their discovery by the authorities.

The harrowing journey of the Clotilda Africans began as a wager. The owner of the ship, a callous and casual racist named Timothy Meaher, bet someone that he could bring in a ship full of African slaves without arousing the authorities' suspicions or incurring penalty of any kind. One has to wonder at the stupendous inhumanity of a man who would put human beings through the horrors of the Middle Passage just for the sake of a bet.

I had always thought the scenes aboard the Lord Ligonier in Roots were masterpieces of realism. But reading of conditions below ship on the Clotilda, I came to realize that even that depiction, hardly one apologetic for slavery, was largely a whitewash. The biggest piece of whitewashing in Roots is the simple fact that the slaves are always depicted clothed--the men in loincloths, the women in cloth-like clothing that fully covered their privates and their breasts. According to Diouf, slaves were routinely shipped across the Atlantic stark naked--partly because doing so made the work of cleaning up their stool and vomit easier for the ship's crew, but also because slavery's defenders created a myth of the naked African "savage". It was the enslavers, not the slave, responsible for Africans' arriving naked on American shores.

No sooner had they arrived in America than the Africans aboard the Clotilda were separated at the auction block. Nonetheless, a sizable group of them remained the property of Timothy Meaher, the Clotilda's owner. This group formed a tight-knit community that chose to remain together after the Civil War, purchasing land owned by Meaher and founding a community they ultimately named Africatown, on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama.

There seems to be no way to overstate the tragedies experienced by the men and women of Africatown over the course of their long lives together. One man saw not one, but three, of his sons killed in preventable train wrecks for which the responsible railroads managed to weale out of having to pay any compensation. Another man, who joined the Union Army shortly after it reached Mobile, spent decades trying to get a veteran's pension and other services to which he was entitled by law. Nearly all of the Africans died close to penniless.

Nonetheless, the book is a powerful work of history examining how the Africans managed to preserve a culture to which surrounding whites and African-Americans were largely hostile. Africatown maintained a judicial system founded on a West African, not an American, model, and the community held on to African means of government by consensus.

That such a thing could happen in Jim Crow Alabama seems little short of a miracle.