[There are a
number of significant
anniversaries in 2019, so for this New Year’s series I’ll highlight a
handful of such historical anniversaries. Leading up to a special weekend post
featuring exclusive AmericanStudier predictions on the year ahead!]
On the 400th
anniversary of their arrival, the transnational details of a crucial human
cargo, and a fraught new historical lens for them.
I’m mostly going
to cede this first paragraph over to this
2006 Washington Post story, and
to the historians cited there (especially Engel
Sluiter and John Thornton
& Linda Heywood) whose ground-breaking research and writing helped
recover and consider the stories, identities, and histories of the 20 African
slaves brought to Virginia’s Jamestown colony in 1619. It’s to their efforts,
and to Lisa
Rein’s reporting in that story, that I owe pretty much all I know about
that group of slaves, and you should check out that story to learn more as
well!
Okay, welcome
back! Obviously the individual and communal stories and identities of those
first (or at least very early) African Americans are and should be the central
reason to better remember the histories that Sluiter, Thornton & Heywood,
and others have helped recover and narrate. But on a contextual level, I would
also note the strikingly transnational factors that came together to bring
those 20 Angolans to Jamestown. A Portuguese slave ship, the San Juan Bautista, that departed from
the Angolan port city of Luanda with some 350 slaves bound for the Spanish (now
Mexican) port of Veracruz. Two British pirate vessels, the Treasurer and the White Lion
(the latter apparently flying a Dutch flag, likely for reasons of disguise or
misdirection), that raided the San Juan
Bautista and took its slave cargo for themselves. At least one of them
(likely the White Lion, given the
longstanding historical narrative that the ship was Dutch) that landed in
Jamestown as part of its multi-stop voyage through the Americas, trading the
slaves for provisions. It’s not just the transatlantic and increasingly
globally connected 17th century world that these details
reflect—it’s also, and most saliently for my post and series, how much even a
small and seemingly isolated English colony like Jamestown was part of that
transatlantic and global society, influenced by Angola and Portugal and piracy
and the Caribbean just as much as by its direct English origin points.
I would also
extend that point one complex and fraught step further, however. Those 20
Angolan American slaves also comprised a potently transnational community, one
that immediately and forever after became an influential part of the new and developing
Virginian and post-contact
American communities as well. In emphasizing that aspect of this
foundational African American community, I don’t mean for a moment to minimize
the brutality and horrors and exclusionary white supremacist core of the slave
trade and slave system that this moment helped bring to America, and that were
inescapable parts of the lives of these 20 slaves as they would be for so many
millions more in the next two and a half centuries. Yet if we focus entirely on
those historical horrors and exclusions, we risk repeating at least the latter
effect, continuing to exclude African American slaves from our narratives of
American identity at every stage of its post-contact development. Whereas to my
mind, as I argue at length in my
current book project, the exact opposite is true: there is quite simply no
American identity without this community, and without all that they brought
and contributed to the evolving national community. And transnational
elements—not just experiences and movement, but culture, language, religion,
and so many more—were one key such contribution, as illustrated by the stories
and histories of those 20 Angolan American arrivals.
2019 predictions
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Anniversaries you’d highlight or predictions you’d share?
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