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, and events relevant to the transmigration of Malagasy people from the western Indian Ocean region to the Atlantic (see glossary for an explanation of these terms; map 1.1 shows the location of the coastal ports central to the book). The following questions lead the main themes of this chapter: What were the conditions that developed in this island that led to the export of slaves from the Indian Ocean region to the Atlantic seaboard of North America and to the Caribbean?1 Is there documentation in the archives or quoted in secondary sources that references this movement of human cargo? What were the economic and political conditions that drew Virginia planters into the global network of Indian Ocean and transatlantic networks?
Map 1.1. Madagascar (showing St. Mary’s Island, Majunga (Mahajanga), and Fort Dauphin)
The Historical Record
Geography and Early History of the Island
Madagascar is a large island, almost a thousand miles long and about 350 miles across at its widest point. It is two and a half times the size of Great Britain.2 The eastern coast of the island faces the Indian Ocean, while the western coast is on the Mozambique Channel. The Malagasy language is an Austronesian language and most closely resembles the languages of central Borneo. Most recent research suggests that the island was first settled by immigrants from the Indonesian archipelago from fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago.3 Scholarly research also indicates that mixture with Africans took place either somewhere on the eastern coast of Africa, where Indonesian sailors may have landed before migrating to Madagascar, or on the island of Madagascar, shortly after Indonesian arrival there. In any case, the omnipresence of zebu cattle and their importance to Malagasy culture shows an early link with continental Africa. The predominance of early Indonesian and then Arab immigrant settlements in the east can be attributed to the wind patterns of the western Indian Ocean. It is thought that in the eighth or ninth century adventurers may have arrived from the Arab gulf states or from Islamicized areas of Indonesia.
There is fairly strong cultural homogeneity throughout the island, with certain striking features such as terrace farming of rice, reverence of ancestors, and square thatch huts, which reflect historical links with Indonesia. The Malagasy language is spoken throughout the country, with some regional variations. In addition to much Bantu vocabulary of East African origin, there are also Arabic loan words in Malagasy, especially for days of the week and words connected with astrology, arithmetic, and divining.4 This influence derives from the Anteimoro, Antambahoaka, and Antanosy peoples of the east.5 Although there