It is thus not a question of choosing between the creole (Mintz and Price) versus “pure” African (Herskovits) continuity arguments, but rather of assessing which framework best relates to specific contexts through time. My thesis is, then, that if any African, Malagasy, or other specific cultural practices, memories, or material-culture expressions remain in any observable form, they are to be found in the contrast of their specificity to the general creole nature of African American self-definition and practices through time.
The Madagascar example, ironically, is from outside the African continent. Yet this difference in geography provides an important example of self-definition that may tell us more about the processes of rapid and deep change that characterized African American experiences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The continued arrival of “saltwater” Negroes into already creolized communities and the paucity of archival evidence of specific African responses to the communities they encountered in New World societies make ethnohistoric analysis of this layering and integrative process difficult, if not impossible. It is noteworthy, however, that what is important to the oral narratives of slave descendants is often not what was important to early chroniclers of the American slave experience.
Collection and Analysis of the Stories
This study is more concerned with community experience and less focused on individuals, as my starting point is groups of people who arrived on ships, and the text continues with groups of people and their stories. The individual testimonies are about family groups and communities; they are narratives about the collective. In fact, seldom did any story confine itself to the life of the narrator. The social and cultural currency the narratives represent is to be brought out, admired, and shared among fellow believers and family members.
I have used a wide lens to examine images of capture, slavery, and constraining conditions for free blacks in the early part of the nineteenth century as recounted by families today and as represented in the historical literature. Though some of the stories I collected are little more than anecdotes, their existence is important and merits serious inquiry. Life stories or individual oral histories would have been insufficient to the project of understanding the larger issues of the origins and persistence of practice of these family narratives. This monograph proceeds, therefore, from the viewpoint of a historical ethnography of a group experience. It is a study of how and why some people resisted simply being “negroes” or “blacks,” or even to be dominated by other African ethnic groups. I have sought to understand how some families instead fashioned a composite, layered identity of being “negroes” who were also, in some primordial way, children of people from Madagascar.
As a social anthropologist, I have relied on ethnographic method in my interactions with various families and individuals and the Internet to maintain and sometimes sustain communication. As much as possible I have used historical context to weave many disparate threads together. What is to be learned from the emerging tapestry of texts can be gleaned neither solely from the substantive matter of the stories nor from the documented histories of slaves and slaveholders in Virginia. There is a lot to be learned from what was not said, both in the archives and the family stories, the emotional textures of what was remembered with pride or with shame, as well as the ideas that are repeated both within each narrative and among the narratives as a body. At times, I used my own African American identity to dig down to emotions and my own memories of hearing “the old folks talk” in order to extrapolate what the slave experience might have been and how the early immigrants might have felt. My mother’s great-grandfather is claimed as a Malagasy ancestor, so I have mined my own childhood experience of hearing that story for a notion of how to behave when listening to others’ stories.
The material in the book is drawn from a collection of some thirty family narratives gathered over an extended period of time from face-to-face interviews, e-mails, focus group interviews, and telephone conversations. On a few occasions I learned that I had interviewed two or three people who were actually from the same core family group. The narrators are generally self-selected; they are all people who self-identify as descended from either an enslaved Malagasy person who arrived in the American South or a very early free immigrant from Madagascar. It seems that word of my research quickly spread among online communities, and at least a third of the stories I followed up on came to me via genealogy sites or direct e-mails from people who were interested in my work. The fact that I set up a website on the topic was surely important in helping me gain access to personal stories about “Madagascar ancestors.”36
I was also aided in my analysis of oral and written narratives by public responses to lectures I gave on my research over the years.37 Some testimonies are from genealogical sites, where queries about Malagasy ancestors occur with surprising frequency—both on Afro-centered genealogical websites such as afrigeneas.com (run from Mississippi State University) and other more widely used search engines and genealogy study communities such as rootsweb. ancestry.com, ancestry.com, and cyndislist.com. I followed numerous 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