Point Comfort: where slavery began

 

Point Comfort: where slavery in America began 400 years ago

In 1619, a ship with 20 captives landed at Virginia, ushering in the era of slavery in what would become the United States

Young girls walk past a sign denoting the 400th anniversary of the landing of the first enslaved Africans in English-occupied North America at Point Comfort in 1619. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/The Guardian

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

We didn’t come here by choice
but we chose to excel and to
build a country which wasn’t
our own
— Walter Jones

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 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.

“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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

What would America be like
without people of African
descent? What would be the
same? Would even our
definition of freedom be the same?
–Dr Cassandra Newby-Alexander

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?”