Truthfully, I had not thought about why I was researching the history of slavery in America until my friend asked me. The work had begun as an assignment for the Sunday magazine of the newspaper where I worked, and then deepened into a book coauthored with two colleagues. But always, I worked at the direction of others.
Three years into the work and engaged by it without ever knowing why, I found the raw material of New England slaveholding so gripping that I didn’t pause to ask. The stories of the captives pulled me forward and then cracked my heart, and they were everywhere—in newspapers, court records, diaries, and census lists. A six-year-old girl with an African name whose owners were questioned after she died of a beating. An advertisement for a runaway black man who fled with a coarse brown coat and his violin. A man who wanted to sell his slave because she would not stop weeping.
I wanted to protect them, but could do nothing for them except continue my research, and write about what I was finding.
I began to read about memory, and learned that Sigmund Freud believed the unconscious self never lies. That it cannot lie. And then I saw my parents. My father, a civil rights lawyer, had died several years earlier, at eighty-seven, and my mother had been diagnosed with dementia six months after his death. Neat in the London Fog raincoat he had bought her, she held my hand in a Stop and Shop parking lot the week after his death and asked, softly, “Am I alive?” I looked at her and felt an absolute responsibility settle onto me. I caressed her arm and thought, but did not say, you will forget me.
From that October day, she lived seven years, dying just a few days after the anniversary of Dad’s death.
I expected her to become helpless, and she did. What I did not expect was that by the time she died in my arms on a rainy fall afternoon, she would teach me about the workings of human memory. In watching her memory fade and then unravel, I learned that there is a core of memories that remains yet is altered profoundly by time and the progression of the disease.
I couldn’t avoid the contrast between what was happening to my mother’s memory and the historical memory I was studying, which seemed so fractured and incomplete.
New England’s memories of its relationship with enslavement had the quality of fortified recollection. Yes, there were slaves, I read, but they were treated more as family members. There were slaves in New England, but not that many. Slavery was not profitable for New Englanders because we didn’t grow cotton. New England had very little to do with American slavery except ending it.
These were the assumptions most frequently expressed to me, even though numerous historians over the past half century have explored the killing realities of New England enslavement. Despite the work of these scholars, the benign and cherished myths are still held close. The popular narrative hasn’t changed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. says that America has a kind of “amnesia” around the story of American enslavement. We’ve forgotten our history, then forgotten that we forgot it. Slavery is not the book that we know we own but can’t find; we don’t even know it’s on our shelves. This is a book tucked behind other books, and we can’t see it.
We will always want to present ourselves in the best light, to say that a black man wasn’t hired because no black men applied, or to maintain that Northerners didn’t have slaves because we didn’t grow cotton. We want to do right, but it’s hard, and we may not succeed. Why not stick with the story we already have? The one that’s already in the books?
Yet we are responsible to the truth as it was lived in earlier centuries.
Dori Laub, the great scholar of Holocaust remembrance, says that we have to know our buried truths in order to live our lives. None of us is free if we keep silent.
I believe that Americans still do not have a shared and meaningful body of knowledge about a labor system here that held millions in bondage. Why we do not has become the question at the center of my life. How did historical memory eclipse the extensive information about slaves and slavery that survives in the nation’s vast repository of early documents? The hard question of how a post-Enlightenment nation founded on principles of personal liberty became the largest holder of slaves in the Western world is still before us, still waiting to be answered.
We need to try to find that whole history so that we can become a whole nation, one in which knowledge of the long story of people from Africa can begin to transform this country into a place of greater equality.
The answer to my friend’s good question is that I am doing this because I find I cannot turn away from it. I am doing this because the lives of my father and mother led me here, to this history and to its exploration. I remember them and I remember Pegg, the enslaved woman who could not stop weeping.
With this book, I hope to honor them. This is my grief, for them and for this history.
The Logbooks
[ONE]
Recovering the Story
CLEARED FOR AFRICA
On a bitter January Monday in 1757, a ship called the Africa came to sail in the harbor of New London, Connecticut. Joshua Hempstead, who had been keeping a daily diary since 1711, wrote that January 17 was “fair & clear & very Cold.”
The old man lived a stone’s throw from the water, and might even have seen the Africa leave the harbor, but for a port as deeply involved in trade with the British Caribbean as New London, with a dozen or more ships “cleared out” or “enter’d in” from the West Indies every week, a single, Africa-bound ship probably didn’t attract more than ordinary notice.
In his tiny cabin aboard the Africa, as the ship neared Long Island’s Montauk Point the next afternoon, eighteen-year-old Dudley Saltonstall noted in his pristine new logbook the hour, the wind from the northwest, and the position of his ship on that first, bitter afternoon. It was his first entry.
Fair-haired and stocky, Saltonstall, though still a teenager, was aloof and proud. He was sailing aboard a ship owned by his father Gurdon, the deputy (a kind of mayor) of New London, a merchant of considerable means and the son of one of colonial Connecticut’s early governors. The family was related to the Saltonstalls, Dudleys, and Winthrops, ruling families of the Massachusetts colony since its founding. Both Dudley’s surname and Christian name were those of governors.
John Easton of Middletown was master of the vessel, and at thirty-nine he had already served as commander on slaving ships for a decade. Dudley was aboard the Africa as Easton’s right hand, and to serve as supercargo, a position in which he would watch over the ship’s supplies and the labor of the seamen, and protect his father’s interests on the voyage.
The two men, both descendants of New England’s early settlers, were sailing their fast, two-masted ship on a voyage to Africa, guiding the 110-ton vessel in a long loop across the Atlantic Ocean and down more than 3,000 miles of the lush West African coast. They were sailing to windward, and following the prevailing winds to what was often called the Windward Coast. These winds blew in a clockwise direction, and it was the most natural way to go. Though not an easy voyage—a reliable way to measure longitude was still decades away, and it was hard for mariners to know exactly where they were on the Earth’s ocean surface—it was familiar to Easton, and a learning voyage for Saltonstall. (Inside the front cover of his logbook, Saltonstall wrote the rules for figuring course and distance using a trigonometric formula that was standard for the time. He also wrote what appears to be a practice equation.)
Saltonstall and his commander were sailing to West Africa to buy slaves and then to sell them on England’s colonial islands in the Caribbean. A small number of their human cargo probably returned with them to New England. Easton and Saltonstall were part of what today we call the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. Easton was already what the teenaged Saltonstall would become: a full participant