Earlier today, I posted a review of The Sweetness of Water, an outstanding novel of life in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Civil War and slavery in the South.
For readers interested in reading more on the history of slavery, the slave trade, the impacts of the Civil War and the collective responsibility of white society for the ongoing consequences of racism against slaves and their modern African-American descendants, there are two other non-fiction books I’ve read recently which bear mentioning here. Both should be available from local libraries and online booksellers.
In Inheriting the Trade, the author, Thomas Norman DeWolf, told the story of the production of a documentary film made in the early 2000s about the efforts of a dozen descendants of a wealthy Rhode Island family to collectively discover and come to terms with the role played by their influential rich white ancestors in contributing to and profiting from the slave trade throughout much of its ugly history.
A relative of mine told me that the documentary film that was the product of this family's project, as recounted in this book, has continued up to the present day to be an influential media resource within the Episcopal Church community nationwide, in the church’s efforts to come to terms with white complicity in the slave trade and its legacy, in trying to support anti-racist and social justice movements, and in discussing controversial ideas such as the quest for reparations for the descendants of slaves.
Inheriting the Trade asks many of us who are white, particularly those whose families have been in North America since the early days of European colonization, and especially those in the North, where many wrongly believe “the North wasn’t involved in slavery”, to think more deeply about how the evils of slavery and the slave trade advantaged our own ancestors, and about what individual responsibilities we might have to try to make amends for that, even at this late date. Recommended.
I also recently read a new non-fiction history book, The Last Slave Ship, by Ben Raines. Mr. Raines is a historian who was tracking down the little-known story of the Clotilda, a sailing ship that was used by several conspirators from Alabama to bring a load of African slaves to the United States shortly before the Civil War.
This slave voyage was noteworthy, because it occurred decades after slave importation had become illegal in the United States. The apparent purpose of the voyage was to win a bet, by proving that it was still possible to bring new slaves to the South from Africa, despite aggressive maritime enforcement against it by the United States, England and other European countries. And indeed the plotters were successful in buying more than a hundred slaves on the African coast, and managing to transport most of them alive, and into slavery in Alabama.
Among my many other reading interests, I’ve always enjoyed stories of deep-sea exploration for famous old sunken wrecks, which is what I expected to be the focus of this book. In fact, though, the recent discovery and partial recovery of the Clotilda, which was burned and scuttled by the owners shortly after the slaves were brought ashore, in order to destroy the evidence of the plotters' crimes, forms only a minor part of the narrative.
The author was more interested in telling the story of the more than 100 “late-arriving” slaves from the Clotilda, who were freed at the end of the Civil War, only a few years after they were brought here against their will, but who then maintained a relatively isolated community in Alabama called Africatown, where many of their African traditions from before slavery were preserved well into the twentieth century.
This book is not the most lively account I’ve read on various aspects of the several hundred year history of slavery – in parts, the writing seemed a little plodding -- but it is a unique story from that history which apparently has not been told before, and it needed to be. Recommended.
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