Middle Passage memory

Memories of the Middle Passage

John Weiss
The history of slavery, the slave trade, abolition and emancipation [SLAVERY@LISTSERV.UH.EDU]

From: IN%"john.weiss@virgin.net" "John Weiss" 6-FEB-1998 03:10:09.61

Ralph Austen's message concerning memorialising the slave trade and African-American efforts to deal with the memory of the Amistad event raises a new question in my mind. Quite apart from the significances attached to knowledge of that event now by Americans including African-Americans, the importance it had for people at the time must have been considerable; but can anyone compute what proportion of that population had been born in Africa and had experienced the Atlantic crossing personally? The American slave trade, or rather importation of Africans into the US, was banned in 1807 as from the beginning of 1808, but trangression of the legislation is said to have been widespread and US monitoring and control did not match British practice. With no references near to hand, I don't know when the last African was landed in the US as a slave, and more importantly I have no idea how many African-born Americans were alive at the time of Amistead.

Has anyone studied this aspect of the event and its times? How long did memory of the crossing survive in personal African-American consciousness in the last century? When did the last African-born forced immigrant die?

John Weiss john.weiss@virgin.net Independent scholar researching the four thousand black Americans who took their freedom in the War of 1812

Ralph Austen

From: IN%"wwb3@midway.uchicago.edu" "Ralph Austen" 13-FEB-1998 12:20:31.41

John Weiss writes:

But that raises the question of how much was said by those born in Africa of their experiences in the crossing, and whether perhaps this was something that was buried? Many survivors of the extermination camps would not talk of their experiences. Is there any trace in ex-slave narratives of memories of past generations talking about the Atlantic crossing?

This is, indeed, the key question. The WPA narratives seem to yield only mythic stories about red cloth tempting African on board ships as opposed to any plausible accounts of the middle passage and what preceded it. Of course the informants here would mostly be many generations removed from Africa, altho some claim to et these stories from African-born elders. Has anyone found much middle passage material in U.S. slave narratives?

Ralph A. Austen Professor of African History Chair, Committee on International Relations University of Chicago

Forthcoming
Ralph A. Austen and Kenneth Warren (eds.), The Atlantic Slave Trade in African and Diaspora Memory. Duke University Press, ca. 2002.