Within the thirteen British colonies, enslaved Africans and their descendants made the best of the hellish circumstances they faced. Key to their ability to survive were the ritual technologies carried with them across the Atlantic. These complex systems of belief and worship sustained them and, over time, became the cement that connected peoples from many African ethnic groups who had no prior history of contact. The sojourn into American enslavement, far from being a story about the Americanization of African peoples, was punctuated by cultural innovation and experimentation between enslaved Africans from varying backgrounds.
The epicenters of Black culture in colonial North America were wildly disparate. Though African-born captives and their American-born kin could be found in all thirteen colonies, they clustered principally in the Southern and Chesapeake colonies of the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland. By 1731, however, enslaved Africans accounted for 18 percent of the total population of New York City. In the 1730s, New York had the largest population of Black people of any colonial city north of Baltimore and was second only to Charleston as the urban region with the highest concentration of Africans in North America. Populating Chesapeake tobacco and Southern rice plantations as well as prosperous port cities in the urban North, enslaved peoples were critical to the commercial success of British colonial efforts.
Just as the colonies they came to were varied, enslaved Africans embarked on European slavers from a wide range of coastal regions. Of the 26,107 souls who were carried to British North America in the cargo holds of slavers between 1729 and 1734, known points of origin ranged from the Bight of Biafra (5,531 souls) and Greater Senegambia (4,730 souls) to West-Central Africa (4,636 souls) and the Gold Coast (513 souls). Moreover, within each coastal region were many polities and ethnolinguistic groups. The men and women who would be transformed by Europeans into enslaved “commodities” did not belong to “tribes” and did not live in “backwaters”; nor were they ignorant of the worlds around them. Some understood the intentions of Europeans and, as a result, developed rich folkloric traditions about them as witches, demons, or flesh-eating cannibals. Some imagined their fate across the ocean as a descent into a hellish world populated by evil spirits. Untold thousands met their fears with the hope that suicide would offer either relief or salvation. Others mobilized Africanized Christianity, Islam, or local religious faiths and ritual technologies to aid them in the travails ahead. Three generations into their sojourns in British North America, enslaved Africans and their descendants had not forgotten about Africa.
The creation of African nations or intentional communities was the principal means by which enslaved women and men maintained memories of their homelands. While European enslavers created many of the labels that identified the boundaries of these communities, these categories took on new meanings as enslaved Africans embraced them over time. Among the many ethnolinguistic labels that became part of a new African cultural geography in British North America were Bambara, Mandingo, and Gullah (Greater Senegambia); Eboe and Calabari (Bight of Biafra); Coromantee and Chamba (Gold Coast); Mina (Bight of Benin); and Congo and Angola (West-Central Africa). These identities were continuously reinforced by new streams of enslaved imports. Each of the thirteen British North American colonies witnessed fluctuations in the slave trade due to limited access to African coastal markets and the development of ethnic preferences. In this regard, Senegambians were heavily concentrated in South Carolina and Louisiana during the 1720s due, in part, to their proficiencies in cattle herding and rice cultivation. Enslaved peoples from the Bight of Biafra, widely regarded and rejected as “sickly” and “melancholy” “refuse” in prosperous colonies like Jamaica, were shipped to commercial backwaters like Virginia, where planters had less ability to influence the market. West-Central Africans from around modern-day Angola, representing 40 percent of the total traffic in enslaved Africans, were found everywhere in large numbers due to their ubiquity in the cargoes of slavers.
The slave trade into North America had flows and fluctuations across time and space, but it was patterned. As a result of the concentrations of specific Atlantic Africans in particular colonies and the formation of new African ethnic “nations,” the developing slave cultures left indelible marks on what later became African American culture. Thus within the mother wit of many contemporary African Americans is the idea that dreaming about fish means that a close relative is pregnant (West-Central Africa). Some, especially in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, have family memories of the ring shout (West-Central Africa), and many in and near Charleston still produce sweetgrass baskets (Greater Senegambia). Others, especially in Edenton, North Carolina, remember and continue to commemorate the Jonkonnu festival in December (Gold Coast).
Many African Americans still eat black-eyed peas at New Year’s for good luck (Greater Senegambia). In the early twentieth century, some African Americans deployed prayer beads, prayed to the east multiple times each day while kneeling on mats, and were even interred—upon death—facing east (Greater Senegambia). Some recall that the folktale entitled “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby” has an ancient and dignified origin (Gold Coast and Greater Senegambia) that extends far beyond Disney’s racist mangling of this epic tale in the 1946 movie Song of the South. All these expressions—aspects of mother wit, ritual technologies and knowledge systems, festivals, and folktales—emerged from the processes by which enslaved Africans from varied backgrounds shared cultural values, merged political interests, and became, over time, one people.
1734–1739
FROM FORT MOSE TO SOUL CITY
Brentin Mock
Black Republicans often urge Black Democrats to “flee the plantation,” meaning to join the Republican Party, or to cease using what they perceive as the victimizing language of civil rights and racial justice.
The “flee the plantation” cri de coeur is applied to conjure the memory of enslaved Africans escaping their forced labor camps in pursuit of freedom. For many Republicans, the Democratic Party, or liberals in general, represent the slaveholders, while the Republican Party represents emancipation. Alternately, Black Democrats often fancy themselves as emancipators from the Republicans and their plantations that are conserving the racist status quo. In reality, neither side can claim the title of emancipator.
The plantation is a powerful symbol, as the foundational unit for racial capitalism and chattel slavery in the United States. It represents the enduringly difficult living conditions of African Americans as well as the enduring reality that their labor goes primarily not to benefit themselves but to enhance the profits of white people. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, conservatives nor liberals, have been able to upend that racist order. Nor has either provided sanctuary for African Americans from “the plantation.” In fact, the Black experience in America can be defined in large part as the never-ending search for refuge, sanctuary, and safe spaces to live, away from the plantation in all its forms, but to no avail.
One of the earliest hopes for Black sanctuary was Fort Mose, Florida, the first known free Black settlement in British North America. It was built in 1738 by Africans who had fled the plantations of the Carolinas for the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in northeastern coastal Florida. While St. Augustine had a somewhat integrated population, comprising Indian tribes and formerly enslaved Africans who had been arriving there since as early as 1683, Fort Mose was established outside the city exclusively for the newer African refugees from the plantation. The Spanish policy, decreed by the crown in 1693, was that any enslaved person who made it to Spain’s American territories would be at least eligible for freedom.