by Ira Berlin
The experience of migration that made and remade black life also entwined the lives of black people with that of other Americans. Sometimes they were so intimately connected that a reduction of one enlarged another. When the movement of European indentured servants to the Chesapeake region faltered in the 1660s, the trade in African slaves—and the commitment to slavery—grew. When the constitutional mandate and congressional law closed the transatlantic slave trade to the United States in the early nineteenth century, European migration swelled, whitening the North American continent. When that migration ceased a century later as a result of World War I, black people left the South for the North. Meanwhile, Africans and their descendants mixed with Native Americans and European Americans as they met sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, and sometimes curious bystanders eager to avoid entanglements caught in circumstances not of their own making. The experience of these peoples was likewise tied to vast uprootings, sometimes of their own choosing but often made under duress. Threats of enclosures, horrors of famines, trails of tears, and nightmares of state-sponsored terror drove many of these people from their homelands. To doubt these movements were founded in extreme coercion belies the obvious, and to say that some found opportunity in these changes states nothing new. Following such traumatic uprootings, these migrants also became identified with particular places, be they ghettos, reservations, or suburbs. As they took root, they too constructed their histories from fading memories of the old country, biblical allusions to the promised land, images of the Golden Mountain, transcendent hopes of American life, and certainty that they too were God’s chosen people whose destiny was foretold in sacred texts.
Even the violent cultural cleansing whereby European slave masters stripped African slaves of the very signatures of their identity—their names—was not unknown to other immigrants. At Ellis Island, immigration officers regularly renamed the new arrivals, often in the most flippant manner and with the same sorts of ridicule that slave masters applied to their newcomers. Suggesting how the weight of a foreign cultural hegemony bore down upon them, many immigrants needed no prompting in disposing of their ancient appellation, so Sophie Abuza renamed herself Sophie Tucker, just as Asa Yoelson transformed himself into Al Jolson, Harry Lillis into Bing Crosby, and Israel Baline into Irving Berlin.58 Many peoples, in short, shared the rhythm of movement and rootedness. If the names were different—Hester Street, Swede Town, and Little Italy rather than Drayton Hall, Monticello, and Mount Vernon—the experience was undeniably a common one, and a powerful reminder of what Americans share.
In the end, what distinguishes the African American experience is not merely the difficult distinction between free and forced migrations or the alleged absence of an immigrant past, but rather the collective weight of multiple migrations. Coerced or by choice, repeatedly and—then again—by coersion or choice—people of African descent rooted themselves in the land. In the process, they produced two massive contradictions.
First, the necessity of the periodic reconstruction of black society on new ground created a sense of “we-ness,” which joined together black peoples who had vastly different origins, beliefs, and interests across space and time. Bonds created by the terror of the Atlantic passage, the horror of the long march from the James to the Mississippi River, and the hopeful expectations of the train ride from Biloxi to Chicago provided a common experience, which became the basis of a new collective to which newcomers could identify and into which old hands could be incorporated. Men and women who had been utter strangers were joined together by the most elemental of shared experience: survival. African American culture was formed in the holds of slave ships and the necessity of dealing with harsh circumstances beyond their own creation. It was reformed in coffles tramping west, and reformed yet again in the segregated railroad cars that carried black people northward. In deplaning a jet at Kennedy, O’Hare, or Hartsfield airport, new arrivals in the twenty-first century echo the experience of their forebears who were likewise caught in the maelstrom of a changing world economy.
Yet the experience of migration that made and remade black life also entwined the lives of black people with that of other Americans: Native Americans who had been expelled from the very lands that African Americans would be forced to cultivate or European Americans who would claim ownership of those same grounds. The contrapuntal narrative of movement and place traced the transformation of people of African descent into African American and into Americans.
Here the story becomes even more telling, for culture never develops along a single path. Each iteration of African American culture was a hybrid, and could only be understood as the product of specific historical circumstances; it is always changing. Men and women often tried to freeze those changes as they searched for stability and permanence in a world in constant motion by positing culture—in this case “blackness”—as a timeless structure. But new circumstances eventually demand new understandings. Those understandings—a new narrative or history—tried to explain how and why the new people arrived where they were and became who they were. Sometimes this has been a narrative of reproach: what was done to us. Sometimes this has been a narrative of celebration: what we did for ourselves. These narratives can be further subdivided: narratives of abandonment (why God failed), narratives of salvation (why we were chosen), narratives of edification, and so on. Movement demands a rethinking of identity; hence new stories.
CHAPTER TWO
The Transatlantic Passage
They became Africans in America. The men and women seized by force, dragged across the continent, and herded into the coastal barracoons called themselves by many names, but few if any designated themselves Africans. Rather their names derived from their lineages, places of habitation, national affiliations, or various ancient solidarities. As they were stuffed into the holds of waiting slave ships, they gained still other designations, as captains and supercargoes invented new nomenclatures derived in part from their outsiders’ knowledge of the continent. Relying on a crude understanding of African geography (and some imaginative projections), slavers labeled their captives by the ports of embarkation or the hinterland they presumed these ports drew upon. Coromantees from Koromanti, Minas from El Mina, and Whydads from Ouidad.1 At other times, the seaborne merchants of men borrowed labels from the keepers of the barracoons with whom they traded. Still others thought they recognized the language their captives spoke or identified some physical feature from the manner in which men and women wore their hair, marked their bodies, draped their clothing, or carried themselves. But since the captives spoke many languages and bore a variety of markings, the naming and renaming proceeded on uncertain ground. Often it was little more than uninformed conjecture, mixed with hopeful speculations. Hasty judgments based upon the flimsiest evidence—often filtered through barely understood pidgins or jargons—soon became reified in bills of lading and ship manifests. Yet these designations also had little staying power.2
As the ships pulled away from the wharves, the captives’ identity underwent yet another and more fateful transformation. No longer were the peoples who filled the holds simply Angolans or Efiks, Kongos or Wolofs—labels that spoke more to how outsiders identified them than how they thought of themselves.3 Instead, they took on new names bereft of any ties to lineage, place of origin, or even port of embarkation. In 1619, noting the arrival of some of the first black men and women in England’s Chesapeake settlements, John Rolfe famously observed that “[a]bout the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars.” Rolfe’s blurt of the not yet benighted N-word would later be made respectable as negro; other names followed, such as colored and Anglo-African, then as Negro (appropriately capitalized), black, Afro-American, and African American. Like Rolfe’s “negars,” these names too announced a new people in the making.4
Africans were thus a product of the New World, not the Old. Just as Catalans and Galicians became Spanish when removed from Iberia, the former residents of Abruzzo, Basi
licata, Genoa, and Tuscany became Italians outside of Italy, or—more recently—Chileans and Cubans became Hispanics in the United States, so the many peoples of Africa were melded into Africans on the west side of the Atlantic. Like the newly minted Spaniards, Italians, and Hispanics, their identity was not so much a product of who they were but who they would become. The process a making Angolans and Efiks, Kongos and Wolofs into Africans was slow and hardly complete after the captives reached the Americas, where the slaveowners’ shallow understanding of Africa further twisted notions of identity. Even those slaveowners who appreciated the differences among the nations of Africa and carefully recorded the origins of their slaves were mystified by the fine distinctions among the many peoples of Africa. Perhaps Kikongo and Kimbundu or Edo and Ijo sounded alike to an unacquainted ear. More likely, slaveholders did not listen very closely. A South Carolina planter conceded that he could “never make out” the derivation of his slave who had been “imported with a cargo of Eboe negroes” some seven years earlier.5
Ultimately the mixing of African nations—not the perceptions of European slave traders or American slaveowners—made the many peoples of Africa into Africans. But even self-identification offered little help in the process of naming. People were sometimes defined by the language they spoke, but allegiance to a single authority did not follow from a shared language, genealogy, or history. Autonomous nations in the modern sense—with fixed territorial boundaries and ruled by a singular authority which claimed a monopoly of loyalty—were the exception (like the eighteenth-century Asante) not the rule. Instead, boundaries were ill defined, authority had multiple sources, and loyalty was divided. Moreover, since the peoples of Africa were undergoing vast changes in the era of the slave trade, they took many names for themselves. Partly as a result of the chaos created by the trade—wars, abductions, sales, and resales mixed with various natural and man-made disasters—African peoples moved frantically within the continent. Families, villages, and nations that had been decimated joined with one another, embracing new identities from the fusion of once distinct peoples. The migrants themselves changed—learned new languages, made new friends, adopted new attitudes, and developed new personas—as they trudged across the continent, lodged in barracoons, and prepared to cross the Atlantic. The fluidity of African nationality meant that captives identified themselves in numerous ways, confusing even the most observant of their captors.6
Identities, whether assumed or imposed, became increasingly problematic as the inexorable realities of enslavement trumped ideas respecting national origins. As the captives mixed among themselves, blending the languages and habits of diverse African peoples, the slavers’ designations forfeited any relationship to reality. Often Angolans who looked like Calabars or arrived with Calabars or behaved in the manner of Calabars were labeled Calabars, although they may never have been in or near Calabar. It was the slave trade itself that created the new designations.7
Whatever their origins, the captives had a different understanding of slavery than the men who claimed ownership over them. In sub-Saharan Africa, enslavement—although legitmate in custom and law and a nearly universal practice—had been a dreaded misfortune, but not a catastrophe. Slaves, as one of many forms of dependency, were generally not critical to commerce or production. They worked in households as well as the fields and shops, less a source of labor than of status and wealth. Employed at a variety of domestic tasks, they mattered little to the organization of the state or society. African slavery was a porous, familial, and lineage-based system for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men and women might be enslaved as criminals, debtors, adulterers, sorcerers or witches, or—most commonly—captives of war, who may well have found enslavement preferable to the usual treatment meted out to wartime prisoners. Thereafter, most slaves were employed as domestic or agricultural laborers; their product was for subsistence or local consumption rather than the international market.
Such employment of slaves did not reduce the slaves’ worth, and it sometimes protected them from abuse. Since land in most African societies was owned corporatively by kin groups or the state and not easily transferable, slaves became the most valuable form of revenue-producing property, as well as an excellent means of accumulating capital. Control over slaves was a source of wealth and power, for it also allowed for control over land. In endowing slaveholders with high social standing, slavery was more a political than an economic institution. Men of power, deeply invested in slaves, assured that property rights in man would be respected. Slavery had become ubiquitous in African society prior to the advent of the transatlantic trade. The legal forms and social protocols to enslave were well in place, and slavery’s legitimacy universally accepted.
But in Africa slavery was rarely linear and hereditary over the course of generations; rather it was often a means of incorporation into family and community. Anointed with rights that protected them from arbitrary transfer by a system of mutual obligations, enslaved men and women enjoyed a place within the social life of their owners’ family, village, and community. Many African societies depended upon the incorporation of such enslaved peoples to sustain themselves, which accounted for a distinct preference for females. Some slaves rose to positions of power and distinction as soldiers and administrators—jobs that could only be entrusted to outsiders. From such positions, freedom—not an individualist’s independence but full incorporation in the community—was a real possibility.8
The door to slavery swung both ways in Africa, making slavery a remarkable permeable institution. If African societies provided the mechanism for enslavement, they also allowed for liberation. While enslavement was common, so too was manumission. Over time, the emancipated were able to attach themselves to their owners’ society. They too could rise to positions of eminence and perhaps one day become slaveowners themselves.9
That former slaves as well as slaves had a place in African society did not always temper the violent nature of slavery. Slavery in Africa—depending upon circumstance—could be as exploitative and brutal as any. Moreover, just as the slaves’ circumstances differed from place to place in Africa, they changed over time. In the centuries after European incursions onto the coast of west Africa, slavery took many forms, especially as new centralized and militarized states arose whose entire concern was the trade in person, either through warfare, kidnapping, or judicially sanctioned captivity. During the eighteenth century, as Islam advanced into west Africa, jihads against non-Muslim peoples added to the number of Africans enslaved. Still, even into the nineteenth century, slavery remained linked to domestic rather than commercial production. Most African societies remained societies with slaves—that is, societies in which slavery was just one form of subordination and generally not the dominant one.10
As captive Africans entered continental Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, slavery remained largely a domestic institution. Even as the number of African slaves grew in Portugal and Spain, the household—not the field or the workshop—continued to be the primary locus of slave life. Some slaves served as sailors on the very boats that carried them from their homeland, a practice that would be carried over to the Americas. African slaves lived and worked in close proximity to their owners, laboring alongside other Europeans—free and unfree, Christian and Muslim. In time, transplanted Africans spoke Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, or creole tongues; practiced Christian and Islamic faiths; gained familiarity with the trading etiquettes and jurisprudence of the larger Atlantic world; and secured their freedom in substantial numbers. By the middle of the sixteenth century, almost 10 percent of the 10,000 black people residing in Lisbon and a like proportion of the 6,000 in Seville had secured their freedom.11
On the Atlantic islands—Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, and then São Tome and Principe—the Portuguese and Spanish planters introduced slaves to a new, harsh form of chattel bondage. Geared to the production of sugar and other exotic commodities for sale in distant markets
, plantation slavery bore little resemblance to its domestic counterpart either in Africa or Europe. Rather it was a labor system in which slaveowners considered their human property little more than units of production. Eager for the profits that sugar mills produced, planters drove their slaves hard, pushing mortality rates to horrific heights and leaving slaves few opportunities to establish families, participate in independent economies, or create lives of their own. In such a system, the possibility of escape from bondage was small and the chance for incorporation into free society nil.
The emergence of the plantation system changed the nature of slavery throughout the Atlantic. In Africa, the demand for slaves fostered the growth of new states whose very being rested upon slavery. Slave raiding and slave trading became the essence of these new states. African elites became less interested in assimilating captives into their households and more concerned with their sale to Europeans in exchange for guns and other weapons of war that enabled them to gain still more slaves.12
The increased availability of Africans made it possible to expand the plantation system, and when the plantation crossed the Atlantic to the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century, African slavery accompanied it. Within a century, slavery had become synonymous with people of African descent in the minds of many Europeans; “these two words, Negro and Slave,” reported one English clergyman in 1680, had “by custom grown Homogeneous and convertible.”13 Blackness took on a new meaning.
The changed meaning of blackness put a growing number of African peoples in harm’s way. Although the initial captives may have been drawn from enslaved adulterers, criminals, debtors, and wartime prisoners, by the eighteenth century—when most Africans arrived in mainland North America—enslaved peoples were rarely guilty of anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A few may have been sold by desperate or depraved kinsmen and neighbors for some real or invented offense, but Africans rarely sold their own people, as they understood it. “Not a few in our country fondly imagine that Parents here sell their Children, Men their Wives, and one Brother the other,” wrote a Dutch trader from the coast of Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “But those who think so deceive themselves.” Instead, black people were taken by mercenary armies, bandits, and professional slavers.14
