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Malagasy—Memories of Madagascar and Slavery also makes important conceptual and methodological interventions into the study of slavery and its aftermath. As to the former, one of the book’s more striking innovations is an expansion on and elaboration of the concept of the shipmate. Heretofore understood to represent the bonding process of the Middle Passage, Wilson-Fall extends the notion to the final sale of persons in small parcels to individual families, after having experienced the transoceanic voyage with a largely homogeneous cohort. This “fourth great fracture,” as she labels this final sale, followed the initial capture in Madagascar, embarkation, and disembarkation in Virginia. The effect of reconsidering the shipmate experience and lengthening its gestation is to emphasize an increasing sense of isolation among the Malagasy, countered by an intensification of the bond between those who remained together into the fourth phase, in turn heightening the sense of their uniqueness.

      With respect to methodology, the historian can learn much from the author’s approach, by which she produces, chapter by chapter, information on various aspects of the Malagasy presence as established or verified through conventional records and written testimony, followed by a discussion of the way in which the evidence maps onto those components of family tradition that relate most closely to the period and experience in question. The order of the process of relation and substantiation is revealing, inverting the customary progression of authentication by suggesting that it is the recorded evidence that is in need of oral tradition’s verification, rather than the reverse. But more important, the method reflects the seriousness with which the author treats the family traditions. Standard indices constituting historical verity are provided in collaborative fashion, but familial collective memory is given at least equal weight.

      In fact, it is indeed the family traditions that formed the basis, the reason, the impetus for the search for collaborative information. It is the family tradition that is the generative source as well as the connective tissue for the whole of the project, without which we have little save disaggregated, occasional references to a runaway “Madagascar” here and there. Their memorialization by subsequent generations is convincing testimony that they did not run in vain.

      The historian typically approaches resolution of a problem through consultation with an archive of some sort, which has often already been organized in a fashion in anticipation of particular lines of inquiry, if not out of an interest in actually shaping that inquiry. As such, it is an artifice as well as an instrument of power, its collections emblematic of social and economic disparities implicit in the very process that determines what is preserved and what is discarded. To be sure, the circumstances and experiences, even the voices of the disenfranchised and marginalized, can be found there, the successful recovery of which is testimony to the expertise and dedication of the researcher so committed, as well as to ever-developing techniques designed to uncover such experiences, making it possible to read against the archive, extracting from it information often thought unobtainable.

      In contrast, collective memory represents those persons and places and circumstances for whom and which the archive was not intended, serving as a counterbalance and corrective to what is regarded as official and authoritative. It addresses, in its own inimical way, that which the archive refuses to honor, speaking to the silences and ellipses and vacuities in the standard account. As such, it is inherently oppositional and highly resistant to efforts at policing its content and claims. It necessarily exists in the realm of the recalcitrant; indeed, it must inhabit uninhibited, lawless spaces into which authority is forbidden entry. Rather then a “subjugated knowledge,” it is more of a parallel discourse, and as opposed to being policed by outsiders, it serves as its own sentinel over a past that would otherwise be readily denied and conveniently forgotten.

      In this way, the realm of the familial recollection is critical to the pursuit of the African American experience. There remain many accounts of forebears both enslaved and free, born in Africa or the Americas or elsewhere, whose inclusion into the aggregate investigation of the past would add considerable detail and shed much needed additional light on the sojourn and travail of black folk in the Americas. However, such stories and information tend to travel only interior circuits of familial exchange. In some instances the exclusivity of the traditions may indeed be with all intentionality, but there are other traditions not so restricted, and simply have not been afforded serious attention. They have no one with whom to share their information, there is no one listening. In the United States alone, given the African American population, such circuitries must range in the thousands, if not even more.

      By tapping into these circuitries and taking them seriously, Wendy Wilson-Fall has shown the way to begin accessing such accounts, offering a method by which to bring such parallel discourses into conversation with conventional means of understanding the past. As such, her work may well prove to be a major new avenue through which knowledge of the African American experience can travel. To be sure, reasons for sheltering family lore would include an unwillingness to subject what is precious to the scrutiny of a process that can be indifferent, callous, and even hostile. But there is so much to learn, and so much to gain, as Memories of Madagascar and Slavery demonstrates. Wendy Wilson-Fall has produced an exquisite rendering of a process spanning thousands of miles and hundreds of years. We do well to emulate her example.

      Michael A. Gomez

      November 2014

      New York

       Acknowledgments

      An endeavor such as this volume cannot be achieved without the support, goodwill, and shared knowledge that characterizes a vibrant community of scholars. I would like to begin, therefore, by acknowledging my gratitude toward the scholars of Indian Ocean studies and African diaspora studies who helped me on the journey of this book’s realization. The hospitality that these scholars offered me, via suggestions for sources, reading drafts, and countless discussions, reflects the warmth and enthusiasm typical of the scholarly milieu of African studies in our era.

      This book would not have been possible without the generous correspondence and suggestions of Dr. Lorena Walsh and others of the Williamsburg Colonial Foundation. In addition to the critical input from Dr. Walsh, I received a fellowship from the Williamsburg Colonial Foundation that allowed me uninterrupted time to do research at the Rockefeller Library and the libraries of the College of William and Mary.

      Professor and scholar Sulayman Nyang was perhaps the first to discuss the project with me and to join Sheila Thomas and myself on an early field trip to rural Maryland. Thanks to Professor Nyang, and to Professor Robert Edgar of Howard University for his observations on Cape Town and his facilitation of contact between Malagasy researchers and the Gregory clan. My gratitude is also expressed here to historian Michael Gomez, who commented on my ideas for the research and offered me encouragement in the first stages of the project. Paul Finkelman, from the Albany Law School, was very helpful and made me think harder about the effects of the post-1808 illegal slave trade to the United States. Thanks to Mustafa Toure and Moulaye Keita of Dakar, Senegal, for research assistance, and to Judith Scales Trent, Alice Morton, Sylviane Diouf, Michael Lambek, and Erin Augis for readings of earlier versions. Pier Larson, Richard B. Allen, and James Armstrong were encouraging and generous in their commentaries and guidance to sources. I also thank Joseph Miller and fellow participants for fruitful hours at the National Endowment for the Humanities “Roots” seminar at the University of Virginia in 2007. Special thanks must go to the anonymous reviewers’ excellent critiques and suggestions, to the editors at Ohio University Press, and to Director Gillian Berchowitz for her faith in this project and her expert advice. I thank Mary Ann French, Jennifer Yanco, and Christine McVay, who kept me working for better ways to say what I sought to share. Thanks also to the Morgan family for the use of their ancestor’s image for the book.

      This volume was preceded by a monograph that was the result of a memorable and unique scholar-community collaboration that took place in Ashland, Virginia, with the assistance of Professor Reber Dunkel of Randolph-Macon College, local historian Ann Cross, and the Clark, Winston, and Gordon families of Ashland and Hanover, Virginia. Through their efforts we received support from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Hanover County Black Heritage Society, and the Hanover County Historical Society to put on an exciting community event that brought diverse people

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