Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic - Wendy Wilson-Fall Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies

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       Family Oral Traditions

      Scholar Alessandro Portelli suggests that the diversity of oral history lies in the fact that “wrong” statements are still psychologically “true,” and that this truth may be equally as important as factually reliable accounts. Further, orality and writing, he points out, have not existed separately for several centuries. If many written sources are based on orality, Portelli argues, modern orality itself is saturated with writing.41

      In the research for this volume, I discovered that for slave descendants today in America there is an interesting circularity between the received spoken word and the written word of professional historians. This has to do, I found, with family members who have a desire to know more about the stories they have heard and, as important, with their need to make a contribution to the ongoing narrative of family ancestors. A query that I received in 2001 on my e-list on “Madagascar ancestors” (managed through rootsweb.com from 2001 to 2003) is relevant to the story of early Anglo-American networks to Madagascar.42 This query was from someone who thought he might be descended from a British slave trader and a slave from Madagascar. He had found his surname, Duckinfield, in archival records as he searched to identify the young Englishman who, according to family stories, took a slave concubine in Jamaica and brought her to the Anglo-American colony of Virginia, thus begetting an Afro-Virginian family. The present-day Mr. Duckinfield’s archival search led him to discover the existence of John Duckinfield, one of the major slave ship owners for brigs going to and from Madagascar in the eighteenth century. He learned that John Duckinfield was connected with several ships that traded between Madagascar, Jamaica, and Virginia in the eighteenth century.43

      According to the family oral tradition, John Duckinfield’s son became quite enamored of his concubine and consequentially became estranged from his father. The father was upset by his son’s unreasonable demand to keep the concubine, and the son moved to Virginia with his concubine to settle there. This is the end of his family narrative as far as I was able to note it.

      The contemporary African American Mr. Duckinfield did his own research to see if he could find any evidence of British Duckinfields trading in the Americas. He learned of the investor John Duckinfield of Duckinfield and Company of Bristol.44 He did not at the time associate his family with Madagascar, but he did want to know his ancestry. In an e-mail, he expressed to me that, although his family did not mention Madagascar specifically, he thought that given the family story of his British forebear, there was a likelihood that the maternal ancestor in question may have been a Malagasy slave. He therefore joined our discussion group in the hopes of learning more. Thus, today’s family narratives are transmitted by people who spend significant time looking through written histories. Unfortunately, as with other cases, the oral history does not in this case allow for a conclusive alignment of one story (familial) to the other (historical record). Portelli speaks of the inherent incompleteness of oral sources and of data that, once extracted from an interview, is always the result of a selection produced by the mutual relationship of interviewer and interviewee.45 Certainly in this case the contemporary Mr. Duckinfield did seem to want more information. I was sorry that, in spite of my study, I had none to offer him.

      The Duckinfield example reminds us that the “captives” and the “slaves” to whom archival documents refer were, after all, people. Like others who have been forced to migrate and endure horrendous ordeals, enslaved people left a mark on their descendants through their very anonymity. That is, the lack of information about forebears leaves its own mark, giving an unknown ancestor a different importance than that attributed to ancestors whose identities are known. That absence perturbs the consciousness like a missing limb. Though their personal stories do not appear in the historical record, the descendants of slaves continue to ponder the traumatic experience of slavery and to keep their own records, and their own counsel, about what they think happened.

      2

       Shipmates

      THIS CHAPTER BEGINS an inquiry into histories of Virginia slaves and family stories by and about slave descendants, stories that echo a sense of separation and displacement. Through historical records we gain some idea of what happened to Malagasy slaves who were brought all the way from the Indian Ocean to the Americas, and through family oral narratives we get a glimpse of how families perceive a Malagasy descent that shapes their identities. These are families of African descent who also claim Malagasy descent, as well as Anglo-American and in some cases Native American ancestors. The term shipmates is a fitting description of the social attachments that occurred during the middle passage,1 meaning here not only the crossing of the Atlantic but the larger idea of the period between when people were forced from their villages in Madagascar and when they were led off of boats plying the York and Rappahannock Rivers onto plantation docks.

      The transatlantic slave trade created multiple sites of tragedy, of transformation, and loss, as it also created riches. Hardship and bereavement occurred on the level of national territories on the African continent and in Madagascar, as well as among individuals and families.2 That is to say, kingdoms suffered and were reduced, and noble classes or commoners were variously bereft as the anarchy that the slave trade engendered increased over time. Some slaves came from centralized polities, and some kingdoms thrived precisely because of their role in the trade; other slaves were from loosely centralized, clan-based communities that fled their homelands or created elaborate ritualized customs to mark the impact of slavery on their societies.3

       Disjuncture, Transformation, and Loss

      There were several important sites of importation of Malagasy slaves in the Americas (see chapter 1). These included La Plata in Argentina, Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Brazil, Massachusetts, and Virginia. In eighteenth-century Virginia, an unusual number of captives, more than one thousand, arrived from Madagascar within a short period of time (three years) to a geographically and socially limited space in the Tidewater region. It is worth noting that of the 1,466 who arrived in Virginia during this short period, a little over a thousand were landed at the York River.4 Such a large infusion of one language group during a short period would have made a noticeable impact on Tidewater slave communities. Over the subsequent century, Malagasy, continental Africans, and their descendants adjusted to a life of forced labor in Virginia, where their survival depended on their personal and community resourcefulness.

      The Virginia planter families were proud of their heritage and power, and from the mid-eighteenth century on their descendants engaged in what I call hyperhistoricity, creating a society where family history, pedigree, and wealth were the currency that bound them together as the planter class. Partly in pride as Anglo-Americans, partly still identifying with elite families and individuals in England, the Virginians took the question of family social standing very seriously.5 These preoccupations no doubt reverberated with their slaves, who were the children (and victims) of kingdoms, emirates, and chieftaincies. The planters’ displays of power and pomp constituted a symbolic language that their slaves would have recognized. Like their captives, the elite Virginians of the eighteenth century also engaged in reinvention of their identities as Anglo-Americans on one hand and inheritors of a “homeland” culture, in this case British practices, on the other. Dutch, German, Huguenot, and Irish settlers were in the minority at this time, and few were part of the elite planter class in Virginia.

      Historical records do not by themselves transmit the sense of loss and trauma that slaves experienced, but they do inform us of where slaves were, and when. Unfortunately, though the written record tells us where the “blacks” were, or where the “slaves” were, they do not tell us who those people were. They rarely refer to the captives as individuals and give little information about the lives of the slaves. Oral and written narratives produced by slave descendants may provide a means of adding texture and depth to the story told by statistics, but we cannot say for sure that these families are direct descendants of those Malagasy captives who arrived between 1719 and 1721. Their narratives do, however, fill a particular gap—What do American descendants of slaves think today? How do they feel?—and thus provide a new perspective

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