Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic. Wendy Wilson-Fall

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СКАЧАТЬ leads based on hearsay, often calling people on the telephone to chat with them, inform them of my research, and ask if they would like to share their own families’ stories.³⁸ Since I began this research, some ten years ago, no six months have passed without a query about my work from people searching for information about ancestors from Madagascar.

      In evaluating the nineteenth-century-focused narratives, the presence or absence of descriptions of the experience of slave ancestor arrival were used as rough indicators of the approximate age of slaves and migrants when they arrived, supposing that age impacted the migrating person’s ability to situate him- or herself in a new setting and pass on their story of capture. Thus, for my analysis, the more elaborate the story, the more likely it was handed down by an adolescent or adult. For example, some narratives of immigrants explicitly named white patrons, places of origin in Madagascar, or occupational and other social details.

      If my supposition is correct, the Malagasy slaves who were imported illegally were children or adolescents when they arrived in the nineteenth century, and they would have understood less of what was happening to them, especially once embarked to the United States. There is, thus, a possible interesting contrast between slavery stories inherited from enslaved adults and stories inherited from, or significantly impacted by, enslaved children.³⁹

       The Book’s Structure

      Each chapter contains a section, “Family Oral Traditions,” that proceeds with excerpts from oral narratives and ethnographic discussion about the content and style of the narratives individually and collectively. The ethnographic-essay approach focuses on social meaning, the symbolic importance of the narrative as origin story, and the internal logic of the intergenerational repetition of the narrative. The text analyzes the narratives in this context of cultural production. The model of habitus, or disposition, is thus engaged in the book’s discussions of the practices and meanings of the family oral traditions.

      Chapter 1 of this volume is devoted to presenting a summary description of Madagascar in a historical context that provides an understanding of how the slave trade of Madagascar’s northeastern coast developed. (I have also included a glossary in order to make the information on Madagascar more accessible to nonspecialists.) Chapter 2 introduces the slave cohorts of 1719–21 who ultimately arrived in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It includes a review of available historical documentation of slave arrivals and relevant histories of slave owners meant to aid understanding of the lives of their captive labor force. Chapter 2 also describes the trajectories traveled by captives from Madagascar that finally brought them to various Virginia households, discusses the conditions the slaves encountered upon arrival in Virginia, and gives particular attention to cultural and social issues Malagasy captives probably faced as new arrivals in an already settled but constantly changing slave community.

      Chapter 3 extends the story to the era of the children of planters who were the original investors in the Madagascar slave shipments and is drawn from archival as well as secondary research. I have chosen to focus primarily on the case of Robert “King” Carter, one of the primary investors, and his descendants, because there is much more historical documentation available on the Carter family. The chapter also presents a few brief slave descendant stories in counterpoint to the detailed information that the archives provide about the lives of white planter families. The stories gathered from contemporary slave descendants seem to hark back to the time of the children of the eighteenth-century Malagasy captives. Chapter 3 addresses how and why stories of Madagascar may have transited through generations and households in antebellum Virginia and whether the proximity of “shipmates” and the existence of shipmate networks may have contributed to the longevity of the narratives.⁴⁰ I discuss the social environments that could have enabled slave descendants to pass information from one generation to the next, and the relationship between geography and kinship networks is explored. What were the social units that supported the creation and transmission of these stories? Were there actually Malagasy slave communities in America? These are the key questions this chapter addresses.

      Chapters 4 and 5 look at narratives that appear to have originated during a later era. As in preceding chapters, I begin with a historical discussion. In chapter 4 my focus is on the nature of illegal slave trading in the southern United States and the quality of life of slaves in general at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To illustrate conditions of the period, I turn to social histories written about Virginia, of which there are sufficient number to draw a general understanding of the challenges the black community faced. In the ethnographic section of this chapter, I present stories that point to the probable arrival of a number of illegal transshipments of slaves from Madagascar through Cuba or Brazil to the Lower South of the United States, and also to the arrival of free Malagasy who may or may not have been manumitted somewhere outside the United States before arrival. Here I hope to provide a sense of how archival records can silence alternative histories. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s discussions of silence and history, I argue that certain oral traditions remain because they are kept alive as narratives that contradict or supplement the mainstream story, suggesting something different from, or more than, what is written on paper—or does not appear at all—in the official record.⁴¹ The narratives seem to remain as stubborn rejoinders to both a written and unwritten record that denies their existence. The stories suggest to us that descendants of slaves and de-territorialized immigrants have been invisible people who suddenly appear in the twentieth century with cultural and national identities they do not always name as American.

      What historical conditions could have encouraged free or recently manumitted Malagasy to travel to America during the period of slavery, and were they aware of the earlier arrivals? What do their family narratives tell us about their integration into the African American community? Did they knowingly marry into families of Malagasy descent whose progenitors were slaves, and why were they willing to do so? These are other questions that I attempt to answer in chapter 5.

      In chapter 6, the concluding chapter, I explore how the overlapping effects of geography and history have had ramifications for the survival of all the “Madagascar stories” and the durability of the idea of a Madagascar ancestral homeland among some African American families. The text interrogates the persistence of the idea of Madagascar and the credibility of Malagasy origins within the general African American community over time. It also addresses the character of these stories as a metanarrative reflecting one stream in the process of creolization of African and Malagasy slaves. By metanarrative I mean, in this instance, the cumulative effect of all the stories considered as a larger story, perhaps recalling a period when ethnic differences and self-defined historical trajectories were being negotiated and reconfigured in public and private discourse in the African American community, even while precise references to these processes do not appear in the stories.

      1

       Madagascar

      A SUMMARY DESCRIPTION of major events, people, and places in Madagascar linked to the exportation of slaves in the eighteenth century will be helpful for readers in understanding the events described in ensuing chapters. What follows here, therefore, is neither a general history of Madagascar nor a comprehensive explanation of the various ethnic communities on the island. Rather, the chapter presents a brief discussion of terms, concepts, СКАЧАТЬ