The Making of African America (10 page)

For those who survived, few escaped some kind of disability or illness. Fevers from a variety of diseases to which Africans had no immunity as well as crippling dysentery—the feared bloody flux—were a fate shared by almost all aboard the ship at one time or another. The numerous pathogens that accompanied tainted water exacerbated the effects of the various contagions. These, in turn, were multiplied by the primitive medical care offered by the ship's physician, who might be a barber by training. The emaciated condition and deranged psyches of those who disembarked on the west side of the Atlantic were a measure of the frightful costs of the transatlantic slave trade.

After weeks at sea, the routine became familiar. Days and nights blurred in the darkened holds so that the captives could no longer distinguish the two. Packed between decks with hardly enough room to move or even sit, the slaves' muscles stiffened and their minds numbed as the unrelenting odor of sweat, urine, and excrement generated by the dozens—sometimes hundreds—of men and women stuffed into small, unventilated compartments overwhelmed all. The stench was unforgettable. “Such a salutation in my nostrils ... I had never experienced in my life,” remembered one survivor. Equally unsettling were the sounds—the groans of the dying, the snap of the lash, the creak of the ship itself. Amid the ordeal came the daily ration of foul water, hardtack, and nondescript stews of yams and palm oil with a small piece of salted meat hardly made more palatable by a shot of rum. The only break from the putrid air and darkness was few moments on deck, where slaves—squinting at the light and savoring a sea breeze—took a silent count of who had survived yet another day. Then came the forced “dance”—the captain's pathetic attempt to keep the slaves' bodies limber—always under the watchful eye of armed men, fearful that the slaves' brief release from their confinement would spark rebellion.
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But if the routine grew familiar, it also grew more depressing, and a deep melancholy blanketed the captives as even the most sanguine became resigned to their fate. The sense of hopelessness increased as the ship sailed west. Some captives—distracted by the violence, weakened by malnutrition, sickened by the primitive sanitation, and crazed by lack of water—were determined to destroy themselves. They waited for the right moment and threw themselves into the sea and the waiting sharks. When the crew—determined to protect its valued cargo—blocked the way with nets and other barriers, slaves starved themselves. The crew force-fed some, employing the speculum oris, a diabolical device designed to hold the slave's mouth open while some gruel was poured down his or her throat. Others were beaten into submission. But having lost the will to live, many slaves were determined to die, and they did.
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Captive women faced special dangers. Although rarely shackled and often housed above deck, enslaved women found themselves prostituted to their captors. Ottobah Cugoano, who endured the Middle Passage in the eighteenth century, recalled that “it was common for the dirty filthy sailors to take the African women and lie upon their bodies.” Officers and crew believed sexual access to the enslaved women to be simply one of their prerogatives. Some captains issued strict orders against dalliances with captives; others partook in the raping, taking multiples “wives” from among the captive women. Vulnerable and available, women, in the words of one captain, “[a]fforded us abundance of recreation.” Surrounded by sexual predators, with but small means to protect themselves, they became subject to outrageous abuse on their person. Although women—in large measure because of their superior ability to retain water—survived the Middle Passage better than men, the scars were deep.
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At no time in the long history of slavery were slaves more at the mercy of their captors than during the Middle Passage. Yet, linked together by a shared determination to survive, black men and women found small ways to control their own destinies. If the enormous differences in power between themselves and their captors left enslaved Africans little room to negotiate, their very desperation forced them to try. Slaves scrutinized the captain and crew, searching for some evidence of empathy in the hard-bitten men who lorded over them. Slavers, despite their monopoly on force, understood even they could not rely on coercion alone. They searched for collaborators who might serve as the captain's eyes and ears below deck in return for some small shard of privilege. Slavers also enlisted “guardians” chosen from the castle slaves who served a similar function in the barracoons. They purchased others precisely for this purpose, generally from among captive peoples with a long history of animosity against those aboard the slave ship. Slaves from the Gold Coast thus were enrolled to control slaves from the Windward Coast and vice versa. Guardians were dressed in the symbols of European superiority—trousers, blouses, and caps—and given the badges of their office—whips, special foods, and other advantages—to set them apart from those chained below. But like the slaves they lorded over, they too were sold upon reaching the Americas.
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The tight quarters pushed captives and crews together and afforded the opportunity to know each other as human beings rather than as master and slave. Occasionally captives found patrons among members of the crew—many of whom had been forcibly impressed into slaving—who may have recognized similarities between the slaves' circumstances and their own. With nothing to offer but themselves, sex became a commodity that might be traded. From such exchanges, slaves secured water, food, or protection that could make the difference between life and death. Relations between captives and crew—however conditional and opportunistic—gave enslaved Africans some inkling of the possible divisions between the crew and their officers, and the officers and their captain. When such divisions manifested themselves, the captives seized the moment, turning them to their advantage as they could. In one instance, slaves joined the crew's mutiny; in another, a ship captain armed the enslaved against marauding pirates or privateers. Captives sometimes benefited from their cooperation, but the advantages were small and fleeting. If they were promised freedom, the promises were rarely kept. Perhaps such cooperation was only a measure of the slaves' desperation.
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Enslaved men and women turned to their fellow captives for support, but conditions below deck hardly promoted solidarity. Tempers flared in the tight quarters, as the enslaved struggled among themselves for space, water, and food. Captives squabbled endlessly. Shipboard alliances among men and women of many diverse polities who spoke many languages and who frequently belonged to nations with histories of animosity to one another did not come automatically or easily. Often collaboration with slavers as an informer was easier—and more rewarding—than joining together with one's fellows. Slavers depended upon these collaborators as much as they did their own guns. When “the Jellofes [Jolofs, or perhaps Wolofs] rose,” according to one report, “the Bambaras sided with the Master.”
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But as the inevitability of a common future became clear, the captives found reason to ally themselves. Confederations born of shared anguish and pain made impossible situations more bearable, as captives bolstered each other's spirits, shared food, and nursed one another through bouts of nausea, fever, and dysentery. “I have seen them,” reported one ship captain, “when their allowance happened to be short, divide the last morsel of meat amongst each other thread by thread.”
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Small acts of kindness provided the basis for resistance, and a new order slowly took shape below deck. Sullen men and women began to forge a new language, from knowing gestures, a few shared words, and a desperate desire for human companionship. New languages—some of which had emerged from shared vocabularies of various African tongues and the common experience of African enslavement—gave birth to pidgins and then creole languages. Men and women with an ear for language took the lead in this new multilingualism, and others soon followed, as the captives shared a need to communicate.
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The talk was not without purpose. The enslaved watched their captors carefully, studying their routines and habits so that they ultimately knew more about their captors than their captors knew about them. They awaited their chance, and when it arrived, they struck their enslavers hard. About one in ten slave ships faced some kind of unrest, and no slave trader—whether captains or crew—lived without fear of revolt. Most such uprisings failed, and punishment was swift and unforgiving. But even those who watched the proceeding in silence learned powerful lessons. Shipboard alliances marked the beginnings of new solidarities.
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Nothing more fully reflected the nascent solidarities than the sounds emanating from the ship's bottom. “Men sing their Country Songs,” reported one slave captain, “and the Boys dance to amuse them.” When they were brought up from below deck, enslaved women joined them singing in the call-and-response pattern that would become a staple of African American music by which performance created collectivity by incorporating all voices. While slavers encouraged singing for their own reasons, the most forthright admitted their ignorance of the meaning of the songs. Those who did, however, identified themes of place and movement, of the loss of a homeland and the migration into the unknown. “In their songs,” observed abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, “they call upon their lost Relations and Friends, they bid adieu to their Country, they recount the Luxuriance of their native soil, and the happy Days they have spent there.” But then they turned to their future and “their separation from friends and country.” Movement and place—the first plaintive utterances of the main themes of African American life—were sounded even before the ships sighted American shores.
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These first sounds of the contrapuntal narrative would be echoed again and again in the centuries that followed.

 

The first men and women of African descent arrived in mainland North America in the sixteenth century, often accompanying European explorers. For the next century or so, they trickled onto the continent in small numbers, often not directly from Africa but from Europe, the Caribbean islands, or other parts of the Atlantic littoral. Later they would be dubbed “Atlantic Creoles” because of their origins along the ocean that linked Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Many of these newcomers spoke the language of their enslaver and were familiar with the religions, commercial conventions, and systems of jurisprudence of the various nations of the Atlantic. Entering frontier societies in which many Europeans also labored in some form of unfreedom, black men and women employed their knowledge of the Atlantic world to integrate themselves into the European settlements, working alongside Europeans and Native Americans in a variety of mixed agricultural and artisan production. Likewise, they joined churches, participated in exchange economies, and formed families much like other settlers, free and unfree.
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With the advent of the plantation in mainland North America, the nature of slavery changed yet again. The beginnings of plantation production—tobacco in the Chesapeake in the late seventeenth century, rice in the low country in the early eighteenth century, sugar and then cotton in the Southern interior in the nineteenth century—increased the level of violence, exploitation, and brutality. Slaves worked harder, propelling their owners to new, previously unimagined heights of wealth and power. Slaveowners expanded their plantations and demanded more and more slaves, as slaves proved to be an extraordinarily valuable asset in themselves. Not only were they workers, but they reproduced themselves, adding to the owners' wealth. Rather than arriving in ones and twos with other cargo from the Atlantic, boatloads of captives—generally drawn from the African interior—crossed the ocean.
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Slaves imported directly from Africa—distinguished from Atlantic Creoles—first landed in large numbers in the Chesapeake during the last decades of the seventeenth century. Following the codification of chattel bondage in the 1660s, the new African arrivals slowly replaced European and African indentured servants as the main source of plantation labor. Between 1675 and 1695, some 3,000 enslaved black men and women arrived in Maryland and Virginia, mostly from Africa. During the last five years of the century, Chesapeake tobacco planters purchased more African slaves than they had in the previous twenty. The number of black people in the Chesapeake region, almost all of them derived directly from Africa, expanded rapidly, particularly on the estates of the great tobacco planters. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Africans composed a majority of the enslaved population.
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The number of Africans in Maryland and Virginia increased rapidly during the first third of the eighteenth century. Chesapeake planters purchased nearly 8,000 African slaves between 1700 and 1710, and the proportion of the Chesapeake's black population born in Africa shot ever upward. Another 13,000 landed in the 1720s, and the transformation of Virginia and Maryland into slave societies sped forward with increasing velocity in the 1730s. During that decade, the number of forced African immigrants averaged over 2,000 annually and sometimes rose to twice that number, so that by 1740 enslaved black people—again, most of them Africans—constituted some 40 percent of the population in parts of the Chesapeake. Although black people never challenged the whites' numerical dominance in the region, they achieved majorities in a few localities. For many European settlers, it seemed like the Chesapeake would “some time or other be confirmed by the name of New Guinea.”
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By midcentury, the majority of enslaved men and women in the Chesapeake had never seen Africa. Slaves in the Chesapeake, in the words of one European observer, proved “very prolifick among themselves.” Despite the long hours of work by slaves, by the 1730s births to slave women outnumbered imports, and the black population was increasing naturally at the annual rate of 3 percent, a rate higher than most contemporary European societies. Although transatlantic slavers continued to deliver their cargoes to the great estuary, the proportion of Africans declined as the indigenous African American population increased. The growth of the African American or creole population reduced the slaveowners' need for African imports, and fewer than 10,000 African slaves entered the region in the 1750s. At the start of the Revolution, the first passage was over in the Chesapeake, and the region was no longer an immigrant society. A native-born people began to sink deep roots into the soils of mainland North America.
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