Ask me: what do i remember?
What do I remember?

Horses big, brown, tired, seeing
too much between the trees. i remember

to put the blackberries in a jar, taste
with smashed fingers, remember

their breaking, the wet mud, slick.
Eighteen sixty three, remember?

"God damned Yankee army," he'd hissed
while i prayed black and remembered

red watermelon flesh, fresh cut grass, smelled
pistol-blood on leather that remembers

three years isn't long enough.
(But the shame is not mine. Remember.)

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On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The “Freedmen’s Bureau” was a critical resource for ex-slaves as they battled ex-Confederate soldiers, former owners, planter legislatures, and extra-legal violence. The Freedmen’s Bureau assisted formerly enslaved women, children and men with emergency food, clothing, medical care and education. They mediated labor disputes, criminal disputes between freedpeople and between freedpeople and their owners, and civil ceremonies like weddings.

The Freedmen and Southern Society Project has worked for years to make the massive documentation generated by formerly enslaved available for all to see, read, research, and learn from. Learn more here.

On September 25, 1866, just three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Rhoda Ann Cody “came into this office” of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Griffin, Georgia and delivered testimony about a brutal rape by eight soldiers that occurred at her house, while her husband “had gone to the watermelon patch.” At least one man, she “supposed to be an ex-Confederate soldier,” because he was on crutches. They threatened to kill her because her husband fought for the Union Army. The the men beat her daughters, ransacked their cabin, stole clothing and other items, and left. “There were concerned in this affair eight men,” she stated, “none of which could be recognized, for certain.”

Recognizable or not, Black women seized the right of testimony where it was available. And whether it yielded safety or not, Black women demanded their story would be told. And whether officers believed them or not, whether it was safe to tell or not, they were determined to be heard.

This offering is for the power of testimony. And memory.

I offer a ghazal, a form of poetry that has a tradition of love and loss, to struggle with what love means in a world of slaves, what love means in the afterlife of slavery, with loving Black womanhood and mourning the suffering that stalks us and loving how we give testimony anyway. With the five senses of the body (see, touch, hear, taste, smell) and what it takes to be in our bodies despite and because and in the face of.

Ada Pinkston, artist and cultural worker, created the performance piece pictured to reconsecrate sites of Confederate monuments around Baltimore City. The LandMarked project is at the link.

May light lift up the souls and spirits of Rhoda Ann Cody, but also Cerina Fairfax, Shaneiqua Pugh, Nancy Metayer Bowen, Lisa Grier, Barbara Deer, the many named and unnamed.

We remember and will remember. The shame is not yours.

Texts:

• Brittney Cooper, “The Shreveport Mass Killing Isn’t Just About ‘Mental Health,’” The Cut, April 20, 2026, https://www.thecut.com/article/shreveport-killing-shamar-elkins-mental-health-patriarchy.html.

• Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Hoodrat Praxis in a Time of Love and Fury,” in More Than Our Pain: Affect and Emotion in the Era of Black Lives Matter, ed. Beth Hinderliter and Steve Peraza (SUNY Press, 2021).

• Treva B. Lindsey, America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice, (University of California Press, 2023).

• Emily A. Owens, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

This is offering #11 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing above.

The series was canceled, but the mark on the culture was real.

When I heard the internets summoned Misha Green’s TV series Underground from the archives, I went into the hard drive archive for material. And it just so happened that, this week, in Black Freedom Struggles, we discussed Black visual archives of slavery, along with watching Underground (season one, episode one) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. We walked the arc of Black visual narrative from hieroglyphics (Egypt) and Nok sculptures (Nigeria) to lithographs, prints, and sketches of the early eighteenth-century travelogue era to the paintings, portraits, and political cartoons of the nineteenth century. We ended with the rise of monuments (Confederate and emancipation) and photography in the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century.

This tenth offering is a mosaic laid at the altar of slavery’s visual archive. It is dedicated to Misha Green’s chaotic and perfect vision of whole Black people (especially Black women and girls), to Toni Morrison’s Black Book, to the genius and challenge of seeing Black life, and to the way we who are Black, with all of our cool and all of our bite and all of our body, even in the time of slavery, were ten times more interesting than [redacted] and we remain so.

Seeing is never just believing, but our eyes are information.

A note: This post is too long for email. Click the title to go to the newsletter page and view the entire post. The images and videos below are worth it, I promise.

This is offering #10 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing above.

…and now, a bit of a tangent, in honor of Underground:

The Black and Indigenous freedom seeking practices and solidarities….

Rosalee and William Still below. Truly, the second season was elite.

Misha Green, if you ever read this, please know the North remembers and we will continue to hold a candle for this show that was killed before its time. Ashé.

"They were determined to have liberty even at the 
cost of life." Despite "abridgements" and "omissions," one
day, you go. From Norfolk, Delaware, Maryland, cross
rivers, with tears, they wrote (and spoke) letters home to kin:

"Dear Mother" I am writing you, loving you, "hounds was
on my" skin but I am safe, Mama. I am free here "where
they would never smell my track" I am "free as she is and
more happier" this Northern "air was precious" Mama! "A
secret passage" on "one of the steamers running be-
tween Philadelphia and Richmond, V.A." I fled
the "barbarism of slavery," I, woman, man, child
neither slave nor sibling, human, agent, bright star.

Will wrote it all down. Took a drink. Wet his pen. Began again.

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This past weekend, I had the pleasure of experiencing a Julia Mallory writing workshop. There she introduced participants to the “hai-ju,” a poem in thirteen lines, thirteen syllables each line and the thirteenth line offering “a closure or revelation.” This is my haiju for William Still, the author and abolitionist, who collected the narratives of Black freedom seekers riding the Underground Railroad to freedom out of slavery.

This week’s offering is dedicated to the fury and labor of the witness, and therefore to him, but also to Julia Mallory, all the women and gender-expansive souls who attended the “Whats the Plan?” Toni Cade Bambara weekend in Baltimore, and Toni Cade Bambara, ibae, who, was also a witness, whose writing offered testimony on Black culture, and Black cultural work.

The Toni Cade Bambara: School of Organizing documentary, directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez, offered various “lessons” inspired by Bambara’s life. One of the lessons was: “Be responsible for your eyes.”

Be responsible for your eyes.

Grateful forever.

This is offering #9 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing above.

How should we address you?

He called you Minty. The white man with the doctor for a son. He owned your father. He owned your mother. He cared enough about you being born to pay the midwife for her services--which is to say he cared enough about his property to make sure you arrived whole, full, sane enough to lift, throw, push, and pull on the land he called a farm, but should be called a plantation. Over one thousand acres, over forty enslaved people. This was no small enterprise.

Language is strange here in Maryland. No romance for the wicked, but no real acknowledgement either of the damage done, the role slavery played. I’m a Chicagoan, I can empathize. Those Old Northwest black laws don’t sound nearly as sexy fine as “Land of Lincoln” after a man who wanted to send newly emancipated women, children, and men to Africa because the political cost of integrating Black people into the body politic seemed too high.

I digress. And I shouldn’t. Because we, Marylanders (am I one?) do acknowledge YOU.

In 2023, a scientist found your father’s home on his former owner’s land.

How many times did you run back there? Not to free him (he was freed by the time you left), but to visit him, your Baba, sit at bended knee, feel his hand on your forehead. I have a daughter now, she has a father, and their bond is intense, exquisite, pristine. How many times would she return just to look in his eyes and see herself reflected back?

The answer is forever. The answer is say less.

The white man who called the midwife didn’t call you by your full name just like he didn’t call your mother by her full name. What is it about white mastery that can’t pronounce a few extra syllables? You became Minty. She remained Rit.

And you worked. Domestic. Field hand. Dock worker. Lumberjack.

These are not names. We can’t call you by your labor. And we can’t call you by “girl!” which is probably what some overseer, supervisor, paddy rollers called you. As in “hey girl, stop him” which may have been what the overseer called out when he came after Barrett. Why Barrett left the plantation, not sure we know. But we can imagine. Fall season. Harvest time. Plenty to do. Sometimes you just want a break. You could understand that and even if you didn’t agree, you knew who the real enemy was. You knew that you don’t help enslavers if you can avoid it. If you have a good reason not to.

“When the slave was found, the overseer swore he should be whipped, and called on Harriet, among others, to help tie him. She refused, and as the man ran away, she placed herself in the door to stop pursuit. The overseer caught up a two-pound weight from the counter and threw it at the fugitive, but it fell short and struck Harriet a stunning blow on the head.”1

The blow, the visions, the fainting spells that followed would continue for the rest of your life.

Who knows what you saw in that blinding light.

You named yourself Harriet when you married that man John, the one you would leave when you ran for freedom, the one you came back for. Harriet and Tubman. A married name. A married woman. When you came back, though, he wouldn’t leave with you. He was free, you see, and he’d already re-married. You married a...well, grace can be given. It’d been two years.

And he didn’t know what you knew—that you were God sent and had more than purpose. You had vision.

In any case, you left that man and kept his name. And went to find your niece to take with you instead.

Thirteen times you went back and forth, crossed hell’s gate and returned. Over seventy people, across these trips. We imagine what those trips must have been like, but we can’t really know. To describe those journeys in text in the years before the Civil War, before the Thirteenth Amendment, was to court death.

At the beginning of Night Flyer, Tiya Miles unearths one scene for us to chew on in the present day:

“The storm was coming. She sensed its approach in the shift of the wind, the click-clack of branches, and the eddies of sea-moistened air. She craned her neck to view the sky, dark through a scaffold of winter-tree canopy. Wrapping her arms across her chest, she pulled her woolen shawl close, then knuckled one hand to her heart and curled the other around her revolver. Ever watchful of nature’s signs, the woman waited....

“Petite with a slender build and still limber in her late thirties, she pressed her back against the bark of a thick tree. This might have been a loblolly pine, the species that coated the old-growth forests along the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. A companion to the stranded woman who stood barely five feet tall, that evergreen would have cast a net of protective crystalline needles.

“As Tubman waited, “night came on and with it a blinding snowstorm and a raging wind. She protected herself behind a tree…and remained all night alone exposed to the fury of that storm.” Tubman took shelter against the tree’s trunk, shivering through the evening as other warm-blooded creatures, like fox squirrels and snow geese, skittered, burrowed, or folded frigid, ice-tipped wings.”

Miles asks:

“What was it like to tuck into the dark depth of the winter woods? What was Tubman thinking as she shrunk beneath the branch-umbrella, listening for animal sounds behind the screech of the wind? Was she worrying about the fugitives who had not come yet, fearing the hunters trailing them and the trackers always searching for her? Was she turning over in her mind the cascade of events that had led her here to a test of her mettle and the silent company of this tree?”

Of course, you might answer with:

“I just asked Jesus to take care of me,” Harriet explained to the questioner, proclaiming that divine intervention had protected her from freezing that night.”

William Lloyd Garrison would call you Moses, eventually. The name fits, of course. Except Moses never saw the Promised Land. Maybe Garrison never believed enslaved would either. Oh, he hoped. Prayed. But even Douglass eventually parted ways with him because he wouldn’t go far enough.

Enslaved knew there could be no compromise in the fight for freedom.

You knew it too. As you guided them by hand through the woods, as you dodged dogs and patrols and rocks and rivers, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed (1850). It required everyday citizens to help capture slaves who had run away. Federal commissioners were appointed to special commissions that decided who could stay and who would be sent back South. Sheriffs and judges were paid more money for slaves caught and returned ($10) than those released ($5), incentivizing grift, fraud, and kidnapping of free Black people. Anyone who helped runaways could be fined or imprisoned and everyone living in the North became implicated in the immoral acts of the Slave Power (however agnostic they felt about Black peoples cranial capacities or biological fitness for citizenship).

For white people, citizen or not, slaveowner or not, after 1850, the line in the sand was clear—you are either for freedom or you are an enslaver.

Meanwhile Dred and Harriet Scott waited for the decision on their case (1854), Celia killed her rapacious owner (1855), and Margaret Garner killed her daughter (1856).

You knew that convincing white people, with their millions of dollars invested in white cotton and Black bodies, in international slave trades, and in all the ancillary and related industries (insurance, printing, clerking, real estate, transportation, fabric factories, even corn production—because, of course, what must the enslaved eat) was not a battle you wanted to fight.

You didn’t mind John Brown’s acts of bloody violence in Kansas, you didn’t blink twice at his follow up attempts to lead an uprising against Harper’s Ferry. He was executed for his efforts, but he set the bar for white solidarity. We know these co-conspirators, white activists and actors who have been killed because they dared to reject the status quo of Black death, genocide, and occupation. Renée Good and Alex Pretti and Heather Heyer, Viola Liuzzo would also be killed.

Which makes me wonder: Was Moses was a name you tolerated, even used, especially to spread the message of abolition? A useful narrative device?

Did you like General more? After all, when the time came, you fought. You worked for the Union army as a domestic (again), but also a spy, a teacher, a scout. You helped organize, lead, and execute the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which freed enslaved people up and down the rice plantation corridor.

You did not shy away from war. Your God wanted peace, but he knew that sometimes you needed to rise up to get it.

There is another reason I’m not so sure if I should call you Moses, a cheekier one, perhaps.

You named yourself Harriet, when the time to marry John came. You kept Harriet when you married again. Nelson Davis, twenty five years old. He fought in the war as well. Purrrr.

“We do not consider her second marriage to Nelson Davis, a younger man, her Tea Cake, a marriage that remains a grossly understudied site for thinking through Tubman’s erotic subjectivity. Although this second marriage supports a framing ofTubman as invested in sustaining a heteropatriarchal family structure, one could also consider the sexual agency she exercised when deciding to partner with a significantly younger man. We do not ponder what it means that they met during the Civil War but would wait to be married until after the battle dust cleared, when she had time, when she returned to New York, when John was dead.

“Despite her first husband’s rejection, one could reflect on feelings of longing and desire for romantic satiation that Tubman may have endured during her separation from John, before meeting Davis. We indulge a bit in the details of her first wedding as a freedwoman, the church where it was held, the announcements registered, the dignitaries present (Clinton 2004). We do not take the same pleasure in envisioning her wedding night. We do not envision her wedding night at all-or twenty years of nights thereafter. We lack imagination. The archive demands imagination.

“Instead, she is Black Moses. Undefiled by carnal desire, she is a black revolutionary body impervious to human needs and wants. She is a trope to be used and deployed, refashioned from being into memory and elevated to icon.”2

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You did not shy away from freedom. The end of the war, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Reconstruction era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan—whew, you saw that the Promised Land and it needed work if it was going to fulfill its promise.

And that was okay by you, because you had a vision. Of a home.

They denied you pay as a soldier; you collected on Nelson’s after he passed away. They denied you military recognition for one hundred and sixty one years. You talked about your service anyway. Not until 2024, under its first Black governor, Wes Moore, did the state of Maryland commission you to the rank of brigadier general.

You would have liked the pension, the recognition, for sure, if only for the financial support they might have brought you. But you had a vision. Of a home, for the most vulnerable. For the girls who are sick, as you were sick when that two pound weight struck you in the head. For the elders who needed a safe place for repose, as your father and mother deserved, a just reward for a life lived at labor. For the freedpeople who found themselves stuck out in the cold because of landlords who would refused to rent to Black people, employers who only hired freedpeople as domestics and laborers, landowners who would only parcel out plots on shares and paid only in plantation scrip.

Even in the North, white people refused to see the truth—that the slave trade was the gravest crime against human rights the world would ever see, that the entire structure of the nation had been built on the backs of the half million enslaved recently freed by constitutional amendment and their fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, great-grandfathers, and great-grandmothers. A spreading web of lost and taken kin. Many thousands gone.

You allow your biography to be published (1868). You take care of your family. Nelson dies, but you continue organizing, speaking on behalf of women’s suffrage as well as the needs of the freedpeople. You eventually receive a pension.

In 1896, you buy land in Auburn, New York. You use the proceeds from your autobiography (now in its second printing), your pension, Nelson’s pension, and you fundraise to make it happen. But you do.

On that land, you build the freedom that you’d dreamed of: a safe place, a place of repose, a place of healing. A home and hospital for indigent, aged, and sick Black people.

You live to see it all, eyes wide open. You built the freedom you needed, step by step, brick by brick.

And then you die, an elder, at that home, in 1913. Your tombstone would read Harriet Tubman Davis.

This year, Pauline M. Copes-Johnson, one of your great-great-grand nieces passed away at the age of 98. She was born fifteen years after you passed away. You only just missed her. We know the first fugitives you helped liberate from slavery were your niece, Kessiah Jolley, and her children. We know kinship pulled you back South again and again. We know you took aunt-ing very seriously. Never in the diminutive “auntie” way. Always in the Black love is Black wealth “Auntie” practice of one who loves their nieces and nephews and knows they are their own.

Well, your kin claimed you too, though they had to keep some things secret for awhile.

“It was a secret because the confederates wanted her, and although she was dead, they would come after the relatives,” Copes Johnson told theGrio. “They thought I’d give it away because I was very young then.”

Even into the 1920s and 1930s, the children of slavewoners hunted Black flesh.

This offering is for your vision of marronage, of home, and of kinship. It is for the sinew and muscles that kept you moving back and forth across the line to free others as you’d freed yourself. It is for the act of refusal that, even as a teenage girl, you held true to, standing in the doorway of the store against an overseer brutal enough to throw a two-pound weight and risk a child. It is for the love you found and the love you took and the loves you freed from their bonds. It is for the spiritual clarity and focus you demanded of yourself and those around you.

You knew an end to slavery would come and it would only come if we made it happen. You knew wars and laws and amendments might be needed, but freedom would mean nothing if freedpeople didn’t have what they needed to live. You knew the vote was a necessary part of creating the conditions for freedom and so is a place to heal broken bones, weary spirits, and tired souls.

Clear eyes. Clean message. Stay on the path. Don’t look back.

I lied at the beginning. We know how to address you. We know what to call you.

Harriet Tubman Davis, ibae. We call you ancestor.

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Header Image: Harriet Tubman’s Auburn Home, National Historical Park, New York

Readings

• Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (as told by Harriet Tubman to Sarah Bradford), 1869

• Karsonya Wise Whitehead. “Beyond Myths and Legends: Teaching Harriet Tubman and Her Legacy of Activism. ” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 12, no.2 (2014): 196–218.

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs. “Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True. ” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 12, no.2 (2014): 142–52.

• Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024).

• Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 169–95, [PDF here]

• Reuters and The Associated Press, “UN Passes Resolution Naming Slave Trade ‘Gravest Crime against Humanity,’” Al Jazeera, accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/25/un-passes-resolution-naming-slave-trade-gravest-crime-against-humanity

• “Archaeologists: Site of Harriet Tubman’s Father’s Home Found,” Opb, accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.opb.org/article/2021/04/20/archaeologists-site-of-harriet-tubman-s-father-s-home-found/

• “List of Anthony Thompson’s Negroes [Sic],” Maryland Center for History and Culture, n.d., accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.mdhistory.org/resources/list-of-anthony-thompsons-negroes-sic/

• MPT Digital Studios | Maryland Underground: Thompson Farm, n.d., accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/video/maryland-underground-thompson-farm-32i8hu/

• “False Quote on Freed Slaves Wrongly Attributed to Harriet Tubman,” AP News, October 4, 2018, https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-2312300417.

This is offering #8 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

I spend a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking about what I’ve read and written. Not as much time as I would like. The Sky Babies might need something last minute (or something that isn’t last minute that I just happened to forget about until the day before school). A student needs a meeting or an intervention. Someone in one of the labs has an urgent issue (last week it was travel back and forth from different places, grown perilous with the introduction of ICE into airports). I think every writer/professor/teacher/scholar/reader says they don’t do enough and really we are doing the best we can. I try to be generous and give myself grace. I beat myself up every single time—just dramatic and unnecessary.

Life that I can’t control already disrupts my research time. So nothing frustrates me more than when I have to spend hours at a time looking through my research folders for a note I need or want.

I’m noticing it happen more often as I move out of the realm of sources that I recognize readily and into new work.

My next book project—on Black women, history, slavery, and family—is finally coming full circle. The research for it took me back to Louisiana, of course, where the eighteenth-century documents feel like friends and old foes—familiar, congenial, saucy. Those are archives I know. They are old lovers.

But this new book also took me to other Souths beyond Louisiana, where the archives are less familiar and the enslaved are closer to my own kin.

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I saw my daughter as she began to think seriously of breaking up housekeeping, and forsaking all to preach the everlasting Gospel. I didn’t judge her. Like her grandmother, I went by water, followed them along the arc of the Tendwa nza Kongo. I saw the ones who stretched their hands out to the sea and the ones who dared to walk on it. Beautiful. I grew pointed teeth that day, gnashed them in my mouth, tasted blood and wondered what it was. That was the first warning and also the first sign that she would survive. Funny how it could be both.

As she moved toward where my mother lived, I forgot the years had passed. But the same light that I saw in the bend of a back became the light that she used to stand up straight, to speak out loud, to sing. She said, “The Lord was pleased to give me light and liberty among the people,” and I laughed at what love a young girl could lavish on old deities, and how silly she was. She thought she’d discovered a new way of living. And I turned to my mother, my mother, who was happy to see me, and the happiness was mutual between us, and we chuckled together. I laughed a bit too hard, I think, because my mother boldly tried to look me out of countenance, but I recovered.

I am so sorry Mama, I couldn’t help it! Don’t our daughters know that the purpose they carry is not new?

Mama smiled at me, rubbed my forehead with rainbows, and said “I have always believed I had the worth of souls at heart but they needed to believe colored people had souls too.”

I did not mind the rubbing, I was grateful for the touch. I did not mind the teasing, I was grateful for the grace.

One night, when I finally did decide that time must pause, just for a moment, to give me a chance to place a pebble of this new dirt in my mouth, roll it around, taste the salt and silica of old hearts and sinew, feet that still remember, that still rub their heels into the moss and grass, I met her there. I could see the circle that formed around her (ah, she truly was my daughter then!) and the way the words she spoke hit the air and vibrated, changed frequency.

She looked up when I walked down the aisle, bent my knee for a blessing, to be anointed, a humble penitent, and in the most friendly manner shook hands with me, lifted me to my feet. She knew me. “The Lord was with me, glory be,” she said and trailed off, fell into my eyes and was lost in the space between the worlds where we had a precious time and much weeping was heard among the people. A lifetime, ten lifetimes in just a moment.

Her hands squeezed mine. “I know you,” she whispered.

I pressed my fingers, still slick with mud and pebbled with dirt, into the flesh of her cheek, an offering of reshaped flesh and singular purpose, an offering of light meeting light across the waters, across worlds.

“You do know me,” I answered, and my laugh was the sound of bells on the air. “You always will.”

She rejoiced much to see me.

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Learn more about Jarena Lee: “Jarena Lee and the Early A.M.E. Church,” National Museum of African American History and Culture: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/jarena-lee-and-early-ame-church.

Text in bold: Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee Giving an Account of her Call to Preach the Gospel, 1849

This is offering #7 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

There are two views of this time that haunt me.

The first is what the birds saw.

The bald eagle, the kestrel, the hawk, the falcon. Black lines winding their way along the grassy paths, the beaten roads. Black knots collecting in pockets at crossroads, on mountain ledges, on riverbanks. Black men, fingers raw, holding tight to “a chain fastened at one end to the centre of the bar of a pair of hand cuffs, which are fastened to the right wrist of one, and the left wrist of another slave.”1 Black women, suckling infants they would never see grow old. Black girls on the cusp of menses, Black boys on the brink of big voices. Black adolescence eager to grow in land made supple by the blood and tears of their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers (some back to 1619), but that would never happen.

Taken from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, the eastern seaboard, they would never see their homeland again.

Take me back to Old Virginny. Black feet stamping blood, sweat, and broken blisters into the dirt of broken promises and bitter dreams.

The Second Middle Passage.

Between 1810 and 1820, about 120,000 enslaved women, children and men were sold or taken by their owners down South. Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana. White settlers carved these newest territories and states of U.S. empire from the flesh of the continent, flooding into land Thomas Jefferson purchased from Napoleon on the eve of the Haitian people’s declaration of independence.

Land that little French man never had a right to sell, much less give away, seeing as it wasn’t his.

And so, at first, the Americans “going west” did so illegally. But the federal government backed their defiant maneuvering. Federal agents engaged in political subterfuge familiar to conquistador-settlers since the 1620s. In the end, they engaged in and instigated war between Mvskoke bands of the Creek nation, siding against the Red Sticks (Upper Creek/Mvskoke) in a war waged by upstart military brats, one of whom was named Andrew Jackson.

By 1830, Jackson, now President, had signed the Indian Removal Act into law and then the bald eagle, the kestrel, the hawk, the falcon watched as new lines snaked across the grasslands, as new bodies fell to starvation, stress, and disease, as nation after nation walked at gunpoint from their homeland to a foreign land called Oklahoma.

The scale boggles the mind. Between 1820 and 1830, almost 300,000 Black women, children and men followed their cousins down, down, down southern roads to the delta. They walked on land, two, ten, fifty, two hundred at a time. “About five years ago, I remember to have passed, in a single day, four droves of slaves for the south west; the largest drove had 350 slaves in it, and the smallest upwards of 200. I counted 68 or 70 in a single coffle.“2

They rode on ships, over sea, along the Atlantic seaboard and around Florida before landing in New Orleans, the busiest slave market of all. They rode the rivers, skirting the Mason-Dixon line in steamboats on the Ohio River before reaching the mighty Mississippi and riding flatboats down. When men began laying iron planks down for railroads in South Carolina, Black people road those too.

At night, they waited at depots, taverns, and pens, watched over by white men eager to make themselves rich from a pound of Black flesh. “In the 1820s, Basil Hall, a British traveler, was told that during certain seasons of the year, “all the roads, steamboats, and packets, are crowded with troops of negroes on their way to the great slave markets of the South.””3

All told “...about two million slaves (men, women, and children) were sold in local, interstate, and interregional markets between 1820 and 1860, and that of this number perhaps as many as 260,000 were married men and women and another 186,000 were children under the age of thirteen.”4

And:

“If we assume that slave sales did not occur on Sundays and holidays and that such selling went on for ten hours on working days, a slave was sold on average every 3.6 minutes between 1820 and 1860.”5

And if we remember that slave ships took only about 500,000 Africans direct from the African continent to what would become the United States (compared to about five million who were taken to Brazil), the number two million moved in a domestic slave trade takes on a different meaning.

Two million souls. Land to fill, cotton to gin, thanks to a man named Eli and a contraption that looked like nothing more than a box with a metal gear and metal teeth, but that box became a set of jaws that ATE Black lives.

Two million souls. Mostly children, bid em in, bid em in, bid em in.

The Second Middle Passage. A curse that could never be undone. “Like some great, inescapable incubus, the colossal transfer cast a shadow over all aspects of black life, leaving no part unaffected.”6 The free black woman, the Black and Indigenous man, the child born in a fancy trade house in Charleston, the enslaved grandmother dreaming freedom into the next generation.

The slave trade touched everyone. It galvanized Vesey. It terrified Walker. It chastened Allen. It summoned visions from Nat. It tore Isabella from her son. It forced Harriet out of her garret to Philadelphia.

No one could escape the shadow of the trade.

The second view that haunts me is what the ants saw, the rooster, the palomino, the water moccasin.

The ones who watched the woman who tried, she tried to quiet the child. Who shook when the slave trader “stepped up to her, and told her to give the child to him.” Who “tremblingly obeyed.” The trader who “took the child by one arm, as you would a cat by the leg, walked into the house, and said to the lady, “Madam, I will make you a present of this little nigger; it keeps such a noise that I can’t bear it.”

The ones who heard the white woman say: “Thank you, sir.”7

The wails of the mother.

The horse that brought the Maryland man who survived his coffle from Selma to a new plantation in Alabama. The man who could not restrain himself from responding when the whip came down. Had he been free too long in that Catholic state up north? Had he been treated too well? Did it matter? Negroes don’t talk back in Alabama. When “the man raised his hoe in a threatening manner” the overseer fired. The man didn’t go down easy. “The wounded wretch raised himself once more, drew a knife from the waistband of his pantaloons, and, catching hold of the overseer’s coat, raised himself high enough to inflict a fatal wound upon the latter. Both fell together, and died immediately after.”8

The ant that watched the elderly white woman who traveled with one coffle through Georgia, for company, for safety. A woman’s virtue, after all, is all she has in the South.

That watched the Black girl who traveled with the old woman, as Black girls often did, forced to fetch food and water, forced to dress the aging body, forced to tend the horses, forced to listen to her mistress muse about better days.

The ants eyed the trader who did not dare disrespect the old woman, but, the first chance he could, “forced [the girl] to get up in the waggon with Finney, who brutally ill-used her, and permitted his companions to treat her in the same manner.” The gang rape that “continued for several days.” The fire ants spread word underground of the sale that followed once they arrived in Augusta.9

Like the fire ant, the women in the coffle watched. They had been forced to witness the violence, had witnessed with the girl, knew her violation, knew it and remembered or portended their own. These women talked about the crime on their kinswoman among each other, they “talked about this very much” and, in the talking, “many of them cried, and said it was a great shame.”10 The ant walked on, but didn't forget. (Ants don't, after all. Their memories scale across generations)

This offering is for the sliding scale of violence the human mind cannot accept or imagine, but can feel, can acknowledge, can memorialize. We don’t remember the Second Middle Passage, at least not well. Not in our histories, not in our stories, not in our minds, not in our solidarities.

How could we? When it means sliding from the scale of memories the size of rivers crawling the countryside, violence the weight of mountains? When it means witnessing a Black girl turned inside out and sold on a whim for fraternal sport? When the scale is dizzying, the destruction is leveling, and the mourning on-going?

This offering is belated, but beloved, a ghost and a crisis. It is for the parts of us that lie awake at night searching for lost kin, the parts of our souls seeking ancestors drowned in oceans with chains around their necks or running—always running—from the madness a cash crop made of men.

This offering asks our hearts, our minds, our hands to expand to take it all in and keep them, hold them: the memories, the people, the places, the times. Because they know, and we know, that the only way through the dark of each night—this centuries long night—is together.

The scale is the illusion. We are the baby’s cries and the knife and the witness and the mountain and the crowd of people thick with musk.

We are the shadow of a missing daughter or a lost son.

We are the ones looking up at the hawk, on the hunt for freedom.

We are the fire ant biting down on enslavers’ limbs.

We are the ones refusing to make our memories smaller than, less than.

We are a geological and genealogical menace. Our cause is righteous, our call is just.

No readings today; the footnotes are enough.

So that when the horns blew and the snare drums began their trrraa tat tat tat and that strange flag of many colors began to fly over the homes of the ones who were enslavers and the ones who were not, is it any wonder that delusion reigned?

Enslavers wanted slaves and power. They wanted three-fifths additional accounting. They turned the conundrum of a thing a that speaks, that lives, that breeds into a politics of representation. They wanted the army on call to put down slave insurrections. They’d learned, from the “ones who rebelled and resisted and rejected the burden of bondage in plain view” that attempting to turn a person into property required force of arms and military might. They wanted a slave trade that continued into the rising sun, winking at their colleagues that it would all end at some point, on its own, somehow. They wanted treaties they could break (with Indigenous nations) and purchases they could make (which they would, later, with France, buying some strange place called “Louisiana”). Slaves became power and power came with slavery.

Black people watched, wary, as compromise after compromise unfolded in Philadelphia. Are there words for the betrayal? All men are created equal. Women nowhere to be found (men of their time).

Elizabeth knew betrayal. Not from her owner, Hannah Ashley, the wife of John Ashley. “The notion of private/public assumes that the household is a family and thus private. This has made it difficult to see the household as a workplace and, beyond gender relations, as a field of power relations and political practices.”1 Elizabeth knew this. When Hannah raised a hot iron against her sister (possibly her daughter), Elizabeth blocked it with her arm and then wore the wound openly around the house. “Ask Mistress,” she answered, when guests asked about her injury.2

No, Elizabeth didn’t feel betrayed by Hannah. She had never been fooled by pretty words and did not need to “remember the ladies.”3 She’d almost lost an arm to one.

She didn’t feel betrayed by John Ashley either, her so-called master, who spent days in revolutionary struggle, arguing that to be a slave was the same as being in subjection to a tyrant—except this tyrant was the King of England. Elizabeth lived and worked in his home, provided food and service to meeting after meeting against empire, including, some say, one fateful one. In 1773, when “eleven of Sheffield’s wealthiest and most influential residents gathered” to draft the Sheffield Declaration, considered a precursor to the Declaration of Independence.4 “By some accounts, Freeman was in the very room where the documents were being drafted, serving the men as they dreamed of freedom.”5

“Something is not like slavery,” a wise historian once told me. “Slavery is like slavery.” Not taxation without representation, not forced quartering of soldiers, not lack of representation or disenfranchisement. Terrible occurrences, terrible politics to have to navigate around. But slavery is not a metaphor. Only slavery is slavery.

The enslavers who signed the Declaration of Independence and then carved out a slaveholding social safety net from the Constitution knew that. And so did Elizabeth.

“Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s earth [sic] a free woman I would.”6

And since Elizabeth knew exactly what slavery was—because she lived it—and she knew exactly what her slaveowning owner had debated into the wee hours of the night—because she labored to make that night a possibility—she therefore knew a little something about the way enslavers lied to themselves about their own truths, failing to live up to even their partial promises (men of their time) or expectations.

It is said, that when the news spread that Massachusetts had a new constitution, declaring all men created equal, Elizabeth decided she would force those men to put some truth to what they said.

“Sir…I heard that paper read yesterday that says all men are born equal, and that every man has a right to freedom… I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me any freedom?”7

This week’s offering is for Elizabeth Freeman, in honor of her discernment, her ability to see through the delusions of revolution into the heart of the problem of revolutionary America, her determination to carve a meaningful freedom out of a new nation built on slavery. Her case made it to the county court. In 1781, the jury awarded Freeman her freedom and 30 shillings for “damages.”8 Ashley, a true Patriot, appealed the ruling. But then Quok Walker, who, since 1781, had been caught in a series of court cases against an enslaver who’d pursued him after he ran away, won his court case—and his went all the way to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

In 1783, Chief Justice William Cushing offered his “instructions to the jury”:

“But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses--features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal--and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property--and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract “

Ashley dropped his appeal. And Elizabeth did stand, many minutes, on God’s Earth as a free woman. She celebrated her new status by becoming the namesake of freedom (”Elizabeth Freeman”) and moving out of that house of bondage. She found work as a governess, earning enough for herself to purchase a house and land for herself and her children. She died in 1829.

And Massachusetts became the third state to abolish slavery within its boundaries, the only state to do so by Supreme Court decision.

May our discernment lead us through the morass of discourse and disinformation. May we continue to fight for a material reality that centers our most radical and delicious freedom dreaming—not the “slave’s freedom” they think we should have.9

Readings

• “Historical Painting Is Altered to Show Most Declaration of Independence Signatories Were Enslavers,” Hyperallergic, June 18, 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/historical-painting-is-altered-to-show-most-declaration-of-independence-signatories-were-enslavers/.

• Jessica Marie Johnson, “Fourth Offering: In Plain Sight,” Kitchen Table History, February 1, 2025, https://www.kitchentablehistory.blog/p/fourth-offering-in-plain-sight.

• Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household Cambridge University Press, 2008).

• “Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery | Mass.Gov,” accessed February 27, 2026, https://www.mass.gov/guides/massachusetts-constitution-and-the-abolition-of-slavery;

• Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, “1619 to 1819: Tell Them We Fought Back, A Socio-Legal Perspective,” Phylon (1960-) 57, no. 1 (2020): 37–55;

• Elaine MacEacheren, “Emancipation of Slavery in in Massachusetts: A Reexamination, 1770-1790,” The Journal of Negro History 55, no. 4 (1970): 289–306, https://doi.org/10.2307/2716174;

• First Lady Abigail Adams "Remember the Ladies" Letter, C-SPAN, 2013, https://www.c-span.org/clip/c-span-specials/first-lady-abigail-adams-remember-the-ladies-letter/5153449;

• Abigail Higgins, “How Elizabeth Freeman Sued for Her Freedom—and Won,” HISTORY, March 22, 2019, https://www.history.com/articles/elizabeth-freeman-slavery-case-dred-scott-freedom

• “MHS Collections Online: ‘Mumbett’ (Manuscript Draft), by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 1853,” accessed February 27, 2026, http://www.masshist.org/database/547;

• “Elizabeth Freeman, Her Case for Freedom, and the Massachusetts Constitution | Constitution Center,” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.Org, accessed February 27, 2026, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/elizabeth-freeman-her-case-for-freedom-and-the-massachusetts-constitution;

• NMAAHC, American History Through an African American Lens - Petitioning For Freedom: Elizabeth Freeman, Tumblr, n.d., accessed February 27, 2026, https://nmaahc.tumblr.com/post/163991306641/petitioning-for-freedom-elizabeth-freeman

• “Africans in America/Part 2/Commonwealth v. Jennison,” accessed February 27, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h38t.html.

This is offering #5 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

The ones who danced the path of the rising sun, from east to west, following the long arch of the Tendwa nza Kongo, the cosmogram? They marked time in hand claps and stomping feet, these children of Africans who didn’t need instruments to keep the traditions of their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, alive. Their shouts, blocked by the turned down pot, and stomps, poured from them and into the Great Awakening as it came sweeping across the farms and valleys of the Lumbee and Mvskoke, the shores of the Yamasee and the Guale. This land—land the British called the Carolinas—did not smell the same as Kongo, Ndongo, or Angola, but gods travel and so do the dead, and the Great Awakening gave them all a good excuse to meet somewhere in the middle.

Protected by proper Protestant prayer, the Tendwa nza Kongo became a cross and the ring ceremony became a ring shout. Right before our eyes, Black folk flew back to Africa on the wings of transcendence, to the beat of our heels on the ground.

• Library of Congress, McIntosh County Shouters: Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout from Georgia, 2011, 57:07

Do you remember? The ones who laid their heads on the ground at sunset, licked their finger and flicked the pages of the Bible from right to left, reading by candlelight and wishing for a Koran? That’s how Ayuba Suleiman Diallo fought the name they gave him. Job Ben Solomon. Who that man? Not when he knew his surnname back and forwards in the language of his forefathers.

He should have known better than to get involved with the white men, to labor for them in the flesh-stealing enterprise that Allah abhorred. By the time he was captured in the Gambia and sold to the English in 1732, landing in Maryland where he was put to work separating tobacco leaves from their stems, the slaveowning landowners of the Calvert family’s colony had grown used to stripping Africans of their names. Somehow, they left him with his, even if they did Anglicize it, Christianize it, stuff its soft consonants into an ill-fitting box. Job for Ayuba. It took a Wolof kinsmen to recognize the way his mouth moved over the language of his heart, to identify him as royalty to the white men with no God he felt bound to respect. Or so they say.

In truth, Ayuba must have met many countrymen in the land of the infidels, must have found covert kinship in their mutual ache for homeland and heritage.

Do you remember? The ones who woke up and said: today is the day. The white people were at church, the landowners and overseer alike. Praying together for salvation and the camaraderie to survive the Black anger around them.

That Black anger woke the women and men up, and they woke up the children, and together they began voting. Who would be the leader? Who would make the decisions? Not an easy choice to make, but necessary. Someone had to be ready to make choices—which tree to turn left at, which snakes to avoid. They were prepared for this meeting. For weeks, though 1729 and to that day in 1730, “many meetings and Consultations of the Negros in several Parts of the Country in order to obtain their Freedom” had occurred across Virginia.

When the leaders were chosen, they began to walk. They walked beyond Norfolk until they reached the edge of the water, until the moist, autumn forest closed around them, until the mosquitos stopped biting their ears and their feet grew soft from treading water. They walked until they found a place to call home.

When the white people came back, they found the cabins empty, their kitchens cold. No Sunday meal for them. Over three hundred enslaved people wound their way to the Dismal Swamp on that day. They didn’t all make it—but they became, in the words of June Jordan, a menace to their enemies, a horror story for enslavers who looked at the swamp and saw the end of slavery stalking them from its dark, stank depths.

Do you remember the ones who choose the most final of freedoms, bitter in the mouth, martyr names on the tongues of their comrades on the shore? Julie Dash wrote about them, put her words into Eola Peazant’s mouth, asked her to tell us:

“It was here at the bottom. They took him out the boat. Right here, where we do stand. Nobody remember how many of them it was. But there was a good few, according to my Great Gran. She was a little, little girl at the time. The ship had just come from the deep water. This great big old ship would sail. The minute those Igbo was brought ashore, they just stop and take a look round. Not saying a word, just studying the place real good. And they seen thing that day that you and I don’t have the power to see.

“Well, they had seen just about everything to happen around here that day. The slavery time, the war my Gran always talk about. [Laugh] Those Igbo didn’t miss a thing. Even seeing you and me. Standing here talking.

“When they got through sizing up the place real good and seeing what was to come, my Gran said they turn. All of them. And walk back in the water! Every last man, woman and child.

“Now, you wouldn’t think they’d get very far, seeing as it was water they was walk on. Had all that iron on. Upon the ankle and the wrist. And fastened around the neck like dog collar. But chains didn’t stop those Igbo none. They just kept walk like the water was solid ground. And when they got to where the ship was, didn’t so much as give it a look. Just walk right past it. Cause they was going home.”

A writing etched in spirit, a memory awakened by time, a time draped in red. Only five years before the end of the Atlantic slave trade, captive Africans took hold of their ship just off the Georgia Sea Islands. They broke free, killed the crew, and the ship ran aground. Undeterred, their leaders led them into Dunbar Creek, causing the legendary mass drowning.

Except, “only a subset of the 75 Igbo rebels drowned. Thirteen bodies were recovered, but others remained missing, and some may have survived the suicide episode, making the actual numbers of deaths uncertain.” Except, the people could fly. And they said “they was going home.” Walking on water all the way there.

This offering is for the ones who rebelled and resisted and rejected the burden of bondage in plain view, not out of sight. Who lifted feet and pens and axes, put them to the work of slicing apart the world, forced the next one into view. Who flew, hearts and minds, away from this place even as it was being born, being made and remade.

And it is an offering for us, in the present, to see them with both eyes open, to witness where resistance is, where it maps onto our own skin, where the weapons of the weak can be held up to the sky, our fists tight, our cries shaking the walls of enclosure down.

Readings

• Jerome Handler, The Old Plantation Painting at Colonial Williamsburg: New Findings and Some Observations | Jerome S. Handler, n.d., accessed February 20, 2026, https://jeromehandler.com/2010/12/the-old-plantation-painting-at-colonial-williamsburg-new-findings-and-some-observations/.

• Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

• Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” The American Historical Review 85, no. 1 (1980): 44–78, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1853424.

• “African Muslims in Early America,” National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed February 20, 2026, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/african-muslims-early-america.

• Ryne Beddard, “The Power of the Dead: BaKongo Inspiration and the Chesapeake Rebellion,” Commonplace, n.d., accessed December 30, 2025, https://commonplace.online/article/the-power-of-the-dead/.

• “The Water Spirit Will Take Us Home,” accessed February 20, 2026, https://www.searchablemuseum.com/the-water-spirit-will-take-us-home/.

• Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York University Press, 2016), .

• June Jordan, “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” Poems | Academy of American Poets,” text, accessed February 20, 2026, https://poets.org/poem/i-must-become-menace-my-enemies.

• Samuel Momodu, “Igbo Landing Mass Suicide (1803),” BlackPast.Org, October 25, 2016, https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/igbo-landing-mass-suicide-1803/.

• James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

This is offering #4 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

Update [2026-02-24]:

Read more

And a pattern emerges.

We forget the parts, but we enjoy the show. We watch from the future with craving in our eyes.

Still in the throes of “reconquering” the Iberian peninsula from the Muslim states of al-Andalus after years of war, the Catholic Spanish monarchs took their commitment to spreading the benevolent wonders and glory of Christianity quite seriously. So much so, that they sent a Genoese upstart in search of routes, lands, and currents that might expand the triumph of reconquest (and Spain’s economic prospects) even further.

This is how Cristóbal Colón ended up swirling around the Greater Antilles in the first place.

The first slave trade from the Americas was Indigenous and intellectual.

“...I took by force some Indians from the first island, in order that they might learn from us, and at the same time tell us what they knew about affairs in these regions.”1

Colón came by his strategies honest. After all, the Portuguese did something similar off the coast of West Central Africa. In 1483, Diogo Cão took hostages near the sovereign Kingdom of Kongo, forced them to learn Portuguese, and when they’d learned it sufficiently, used those hostages to tell them all that they could about the land and its people.2

Of those Indigenous women, children and men Cristóbal Colón kidnapped, seven survived long enough to be paraded through the streets of Seville where a young Bartolomé de las Casas was watching.3 Colón would round up hundreds of Indigenous from the Caribbean to sell in Spain, in part to offset the cost of his voyages and in part to honor Queen Isabela.

Don Nicolás Ovando did not find African or Indigenous intellect very appealing. In the fall of 1501, Don Nicolás Ovando requested and received permission from Ferdinand and Isabela to bring African slaves to the Caribbean. By then, the Catholic monarchy had seen how massive the project of conquering the Americas would be. Yet, they still understood empire to be an intellectual project, a winning of hearts and minds kind of thing. Ferdinand and Isabel granted Ovando the authority to bring enslaved Black people to the Caribbean, but only the ones who would come to be known as ladinos—African- and Iberian- born Black slaves who already converted to Catholicism, who already appeared to fit the Iberian project of empire, who, in their royal estimation, wouldn’t rock colonialism’s boat because they already thought like colonizers.

“Because with great care we have procured the conversion of the Indians to our Holy Catholic Faith, and furthermore, if there are still people there who are doubtful of the faith in their own conversions, it would be a hindrance [to them], and therefore we will not permit, nor allow to go there [to the Americas] Moors nor Jews nor heretics nor reconciled heretics, nor persons who are recently converted to our faith, except if they are black slaves, or other slaves, that have been born under the dominion of our natural Christian subjects.”4

Let me take a detour here, in case you don’t get to the bottom of this post.

There is no acculturation that will ever be enough for empire to ease down and say, “hey, you, colonized person or persons—we accept you.”

Just ask the ladinos, the supposedly Hispanicized Catholic Africans like Juan Garrido, who found themselves forced into the project of empire and then had to beg for financial support at the end of their lives just like any other ordinary, elderly and impoverished slave.5

Poor Garrido. We dragged him into the history books, dubbed him conquistador like that was a badge of honor, and, in truth, he was just a Black man on the wrong side of servitude, stuck with a master who got called to come down to the wharf and head to the New World.

In the end, ladino slave trade or not, the next year, Ovando broke his own rules, importing a handful of African captives direct from the continent.

A pattern emerges. Bondage. Labor.

Then Isabela died and Ferdinand could stop pretending he cared about souls, or intellect, or anything except gold. Africans began to trickle into the Caribbean from everywhere.

Even with Africans to import, the Ovandos, the Colóns, the Ponce de Leons, their allies and their progeny, still adopted the encomienda system to force Indigenous Caribbean women, children and men into labor camps (”Indian villages”) and from there into mining, farming, and domestic service. How did it work, you ask? The same way the Portuguese forced the King of Ndongo to compromise. Engage in political intrigue and flattery. If that doesn’t work, mobilize political enemies and make the enemy of your enemy your friend. If that doesn’t work (or even if it does, to be honest), barge into homes and force bodies out of beds at night. March them from their villages and communities. Force them to labor at gunpoint, to the barking of man-eating dogs, to the tune of insufficient troughs of water and food. When you’ve collected enough gold (or sugar or coffee, a pattern), offer their broken bodies a chance to return to their bohios and beds, but only for a respite, only until the next season of forced labor begins.

Within ten years, the caciques of Boríken and Hispaniola would say enough is enough.

The Indigenous war against Spanish conquistadors rocked Boríken, Hispaniola (or Quisqeya/Ayiti), and the islands and archipelagos around them. It nearly unseated the Spanish from their so-called Caribbean colonies. It shocked the Dominican missionaries into petitioning for an end to Indigenous slavery, including one friar who suggested that Africans could take the place of Indigenous laborers (though Bartolomé de las Casas would later come to regret those terms). It convinced Juan Ponce de Léon he might want to look elsewhere for glory and gold (he’d heard maybe Florida had better beaches for that yellow stuff).

A throwback for the Groceries and Coffee Crew:

Spanish conquistador-settlers continued importing Africans, never more than a handful at a time, but always with high hopes Black captives might prove easier to manage than Indigenous ones, who were just so recalcitrant and ungrateful. Easier to break and mold people to the demands of forced labor and obedience and, oh right, Catholic supremacy, if you take them far from home.

In the Slave Voyages database, the first documented slave ship from the African continent that lands in the Americas, lands in Puerto Rico in 1516. In fact, all of the first voyages in the database before 1526 land in either San Juan or San Germán in Puerto Rico—which, in the future, would be called la isla del encanto.

A pattern emerges. Bondage. Labor. Resistance. Indigenous and African remembering who we are to each other and who the real enemy is. This is what the oldest colony of the Caribbean teaches us.

In 1527, a rumor began to spread. A whisper of freedom, a sigh of anger, a growl of inspiration. An insurgency led by Indigenous laborers, enslaved Africans, especially Jelofes (Wolof), maybe the Berbers (North Africans) and definitely the ladinos. The rumor began to spread across Boríken. Over the next decade, a series of African and Indigenous revolts—acts of defiance, subterfuge, and marronage—occurred across Puerto Rico’s archipelago. Africans, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous alike found ways to fight back.

The documents never provide a smoking or explosive gun, a legajo of testimony. Not like the 1811 Louisiana Slave Revolt or the Southampton Revolt. Nothing so tangible and textual.

But within ten years, officials in San Juan would attempt to prohibit captains from permitting Wolofs or even ladinos to be sold in the archipelago. And conquistador-settlers began to feel a little shiver down their spine as they walked the muddy roads that led to the port of San Juan. Eventually, most would take their dreams of gold and blood to the southern continent or to Brazil, or follow in Ponce de Leon’s footsteps further north.

The African and Indigenous Caribbean, they whispered, is just too hard to manage. Too dangerous. Best to leave that God-forsaken place to the savages. “Puerto Rico está cabrón,” they told each other and they would never admit it, but their voices shook.

A full blown sugar economy wouldn’t emerge in Puerto Rico for another two centuries.

And what was made in the meantime? PRECIOSA.

A pattern emerges and it is the language we speak to each other when we don’t know each other’s language. It is a guttural tongue, full bodied and open mouthed, every muscle working to unmake European syllables, insert new letters that roar loud like the Congo River or whistle soft like rain on the Víví (Otoao) river or vibrating like the أَذَان. It isn’t an easy language to speak, it isn’t easy to understand, but, then again, speaking the language of solidarity, of witnessing, of fighting together is hard.

This third offering is for the unspoken, the unnamed, the unthought and the languages they created, the remarkable future they brought into being. A pattern they mastered so completely it is nearly invisible in the archive. A pattern they could sense but not see, that led from the deck of ships going in both directions, and from there to the slave castle to the mines to the plantations to the markets to the bays and the coves and into the pirogues and, sometimes, sometimes, through rivers of fire and oceans of blood, onto the manuscript page, and from there through the centuries to meet you and me here.

It is an offering for the seven Indigenous survivors who walked off Colón’s slave ship and walked the streets of Seville, the ladinos who talked back in Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese while they bided their time, the Wolof who, fresh from war, stood ready to wage battle on new terrain, the caciques who wouldn’t back down determined to prove even gods could be killed.

We forget the parts, but we know the parts are there. This is what the archipelago and diaspora teach us.

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Readings

• Alexa Rodríguez, “Reflections on the 1521 Rebellion: Teaching the History of Early Afro-Descendants in Latin America,” Latino Studies (London, United Kingdom) 20, no. 4 (2022): 555–61, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-022-00374-3.

• Sophia Monegro, “Origins of Black Feminist Thought in the Americas: La Negra Del Hospital in Colonial Santo Domingo,” Global Black Thought 1, no. 2 (2025): 289–321.

• Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, The Santo Domingo Slave Revolt of 1521 and the Slave Laws of 1522: Black Slavery and Black Resistance in the Early Colonial Americas (Dominican Studies Institute, 2019).

• Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2026).

• Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024).

• Jalil Sued Badillo and Angel Lopez Cantos, Puerto Rico Negro (Ediciones Cultural, 2001).

• Karen F. Anderson-Córdova, Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico (University of Alabama Press, 2017).

• Dylan Cobban, “The Story of Juan Garrido,” History Workshop, September 4, 2025, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/empire-decolonisation/the-story-of-juan-garrido/.

• Octavia E. Butler, Seed to Harvest (Grand Central Publishing, 2007). And yes, if you recognize “patternmaster” you should.

This is offering #3 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

How does a people know who they are? How do they even know they are a people?

Catch up on the first offering here:

So after the Mendes de Vasconçelos men, father and son, orchestrated the slaughter of hundreds and trafficking of thousands of women, children and men for the pleasure of the Portuguese king, these subjects of the kingdoms of Ndongo, Matemba, Angola, and Kongo were taken on ships from the port of Luanda to parts around the world.

In the maps of slave ships we have available to us today, visualizations of data collected from slave ship registers, travel accounts, colonial documents, and the hands and minds of trusted researchers, we would still never know that some of those Africans leaving from Luanda, in 1619, on a Portuguese slave ship named São João Bautista, would end up at Point Comfort, miles off the Portuguese captain’s course in a swampy outpost off the coast of Virginia, a place now called Fort Monroe.

In 1619, the São João Bautista left the coast of Africa near Luanda flying the Portuguese flag and on its way to Vera Cruz. The Portuguese had hold of the asiento by then, giving them a license to take and take and take souls onto ships and land them in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil for slave traders and colonial administrators alike to purchase. The Spanish thought it unseemly and against their Catholic pearl-clutching morals to traffic in human bondage directly. Thanks in part to Friar Bartolomé de las Casas petitions (another “man of his time”), the asiento now covered the sin. The Spanish would not traffic in slaves. They would simply license the right to other nations and purchase from those who did. I guess they were leaving it up to the slave traders to defend their own souls once they reached the pearly gates.

How much the asiento mattered to the Kongo, Angola, Ndongo, Imbangala, Kimbundu, Vili and other women, children and men roiling in the depths of the hold we can never know. Global contracts for forced and carceral labor often seem strange and opaque to the average of us, busy going about our everyday lives feeding, watering, and caring for our families, our homes, our communities. But somewhere a cabal of nobles, explorers, and mariners decided that the asiento gave them the cover they needed to get rich quick, and they were willing to do anything to join the fray. They had little oversight. They didn’t wear masks, show their badge numbers, have body cams, and were rarely reported or upbraided for their behavior. Sometimes, like in the case of a woman “big with child” and known only as “No. 83,” they let their frustrations out in a depraved and sociopathic manner. No. 83 suffered the abuse of crew member who took her “down into the room and lay with her brute-like in view of the whole quarter deck.” Such violence verged on damaging the merchandise. The captain punished the crew member, proving that, sometimes, if it threatened the profit margin, a rape could be witnessed, even avenged.1 Sometimes. Rarely.

The cabal of nobles, explorers and mariners who developed a taste for slave trading, a fraternity not unlike the fraternity of men revealed in the Epstein files, did not necessarily need to be from the same country. In fact, by the time the São João Bautista hit the high seas, the English and the Dutch had decided they wouldn’t be left out of such bloody good fun. Attacking under subterfuge, false flags, and with plans for glory, God and gold (or sugar, the white gold of the early modern era), privateers took the São João Bautista at sea. Two ships did the deed: The Treasurer and The White Lion.

The crew of these ships proceeded to divide the Kongo, Angolan, Ndongo, Kimbundu, Imbangala, Vili and more women, children, and men between them( only fair after all). And they headed back out to sea, searching for a likely British colony to “bid em in” and buy them all.

How does a people know they are 20 Odd Negroes? From Angolan to Negro, from African kingdom to Virgina Company, from warrior to slave to servant, all it took was...

….well, it took a lot. It took force of arms. It took political subterfuge. It took Portuguese alliances and lies and hubris. It took English privateers willing to troll the ocean looking for black gold. It took a ship that needed to resupply and was willing to trade water and food for bodies. It took a company official to write it all down. A clerk to save the document. A royal official to save the document. An archivist to preserve it. A researcher to return to the archive and ask, when they came across it all, “well what do we have here?”

A whole slave ship auction wasn’t necessary for Africans to land at Point Comfort. Just white slavers needing water. But the caprice of circumstance masks the global, generational effort of making people into property. Of attempting to tear people from their people.

What I mean to say is: Europeans fought with every military, political, technological and intellectual tool in their belt to make an empire of slaves because people know they are not property, humans know they are not things, the living know they are not dead. Europeans fought to create empire, and it remains an unfinished fight, one they had and have to wake up and defend with bloody purpose every hour of every day for generations.

No wonder they are so fucking mad right now. I’d be mad after centuries of trying and failing at supremacy too.

Because they did fail. And continue to fail.

Those “20 odd” didn’t relinquish their identities easily, didn’t become just Odd and Negro and a number in an archival document. As late as 1667, John Johnson, Jr., the grandson of “Antonio a Negro,” one of the captives on that ship, owned a homestead on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and named it “Angola.” Black man, born on black earth in Virginia, child of Black people who lived the time of slavery by refusing erasure, as we have since 1444, since 1502, since 1619.

Refusing erasure is an act of claiming kinship and peoplehood and John Jr. did—he claimed himself and his grandfather and a land across the ocean. The West Central Africans who stepped off The White Lion did so as survivors of a hard and dark time but would go on to carve comfort at Point Comfort, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and beyond, a labor of care and claim of power.2

In 1925, the year before Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History christened the first Negro History Week, Black Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg wrote “the American negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” Born in San Mateo de Cangrejos, Puerto Rico, in 1874 (two years before Woodson), a town created by maroons absconding from Spanish predations across the Caribbean, Schomburg would eventually migrate to New York City and become the curator of Division of Negro Literature and Art at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. In 1972, the collection would become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and under director Howard Dodson would open a new building with expanded purpose.3

Schomburg did not shy away from the word Negro, did not shirk from Anglicizing or Latinizing his name (using Arthur and Arturo throughout his life). He did not seem to have much interest in policing the lines of Blackness, diaspora, slave or immigrant, nation or even identity. Why should he? He was a man of his times and his times told him that to be Black is to be rigorous, global, transnational, and multi-lingual. To be Black is to be the child of Africans dragged from their homes to foreign lands by strangers seeking greed and gold.

The documents we take for granted today? Phillis Wheatley’s poems, Equiano’s testimony, Jupiter Harmon’s sermons, Paul Cuffee’s petitions and more? at the time of Schomburg’s writing, those papers had been long ignored by white professional historians. To be Black is to name your home for your grand-parents struggle and to name your struggle by building an archive and gathering with other “Negro antiquarians” fighting to recover narrative material written by Africans and their descendants, the residue of textual resistance enacted by Black people in the United States, Caribbean, and African continent.

For Schomburg, to be Negro was to be at the most violent intersection of slave and immigrant, so that the words for either elide into a shared language of exploitation, extraction, and empire. Slave, immigrant, African, Black, to be Negro was to know these mattered only in what fierce history we recovered and retaught ourselves, mattered only in how they fueled our solidarities and fight against empire.

To succumb to the terms placed upon our beings is to allow our histories, our identities, creativity, and sense of ourselves to continue to be guided, routed, and manipulated by white people who dream of pledging the conquistador-settler fraternity that gave birth to Ep Phi Stein.

“The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture. But a new notion of the cultural attainment and potentialities of the African stocks has recently come about. Already the Negro sees himself against a reclaimed background, in a perspective that will give pride and self-respect ampe scope, and make history yield for him the same values that the treasured past of any people affords.”

Today’s offering asks us to reclaim the practice of solidarity and resistance epitomized by the Negro antiquarian himself, the descendant of fugitives, the defiant Antilliano, the son of Harlem, who knew our kinship mattered more than our differences because our differences were created by men with guns, men on ships, men with rape in their eyes. He knew that the lesson of history and the lesson of community and the lesson of solidarity are a Venn diagram and that diagram is a circle.

Happy 100^th Black History Month to all. Happy 101st birthday to this incredible essay. Mr. Schomburg, ibae! We speak your name.

Readings

• Arthur A. Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (Albert and Charles Boni, 1925). (READ)

• Biplob Kumar Das, “ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans,” The Intercept, February 5, 2026, https://theintercept.com/2026/02/05/private-prison-corecivic-geo-group-ice-bank-loan/;

• Associated Press, “‘Negro’ Will No Longer Be Used on US Census Surveys,” TheGrio, February 25, 2013, https://thegrio.com/2013/02/25/negro-will-no-longer-be-used-on-us-census-surveys/

• D’Vera Cohn, “Race and the Census: The ‘Negro’ Controversy,” Pew Research Center, January 21, 2010, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/01/21/race-and-the-census-the-negro-controversy/.

• Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020).

• Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (Oxford University Press, 2007).

• “A Look at Arturo Schomburg’s Essay, ‘The Negro Digs Up His Past,’ 100 Years Later,” The New York Public Library, accessed February 6, 2026, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2025/03/04/look-arturo-schomburgs-essay-negro-digs-his-past-100-years-later

• “1924: A Year in the Life of Future Schomburg Center Founder Arturo Schomburg,” The New York Public Library, accessed February 6, 2026, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2024/01/03/1924-year-life-future-schomburg-center-founder-arturo-schomburg

Resources

“In 2000, respondents were allowed to pick more than one race for the first time. The “race” data item retained essentially the same categories as in 1990 with a few adjustments. “Black or Negro” became “Black, African Am., or Negro” marking the first appearance of “African-American” on the Census form. The three Native American categories were grouped together as “American Indian or Alaska Native” with a write-in of tribe. “Guamanian” became “Guamanian or Chamorro” and “Hawaiian” became “Native Hawaiian”. The “Other API” group was split into “Other Asian” and “Other Pacific Islander” with a separate write-in. Finally, “Other” became “Some other race” with its own write-in line.”

And:

““In the 2000 census, about 50,000 people specifically wrote in the word Negro when asked how they wished to be identified. By 2010, unpublished census data provided to the AP show that number had declined to roughly 36,000.””

Also— Fort Monroe, National Park Service site: https://www.nps.gov/articles/featured_stories_fomr.htm

Annual Arturo A. Schomburg Lecture and Conversation, directed by Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 2025, 01:27:27,

This is offering #2 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

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In 1619, a Portuguese slaver named Sao Joao Bautista left the Portuguese-controlled port of Luanda in the colony of Angola, on the coast of West Central Africa. The Portuguese infiltrated the Kingdom of Kongo and established, by military might and political machinations, a fortified port town at Luanda in 1575.1 The Portuguese came for gold, then slaves, pushing West Central Africans into the Middle Passage and landing them on sugar plantations in Brazil. By 1595, the Portuguese held the Spanish asiento, a contract European merchants craved more than Ai data centers crave fresh water. The asiento granted merchants the privilege of trading and selling African captives to and in land claimed by the Spanish empire. Luanda became ground zero for this Black gold.

1595 is still years away from 1619, so why does this matter? First, the Portuguese had been trading, engaged in diplomacy, and engaged in warfare and slave raiding in West Central Africa for over a century by the time the Sao Joao Bautista left port. Over a hundred years for kings and elites, traders and peasants, foreigners and locals to create social ties, kinship networks, livelihoods, and spiritual paths centered on profiting from or defending themselves from slaving. A new Atlantic world, as some scholars have argued.

Second, the two sides of 1619 give me a glimpse into the way even conquistador-settlers, with all their pretentions and hubris, couldn’t control the history they themselves set in motion.

I describe the Portuguese in Africa as conquistador-settlers, and I thank Tiffany Lethabo King for her framing of “conquistador-settler” (which is in a footnote in The Black Shoals):

“”I argue that “settler” does not explicitly name its relationship to the ongoing violence of genocide that continues to be enacted on Indigenous bodies. The term “settler” also entirely disavows the relationship that White settlers have to the institution of slavery, its afterlife, and ongoing practices and regimes of anti-Black violence. “Conquistador-settler” invokes both the violence enacted on the Indigenous and Black body and the possession of land.”2

As conquistador-settlers, the Portuguese did not arrive in good faith, never mind their efforts at diplomacy and their recognition that, as Herman Bennett argues in African Kings and Black Slaves, the Kings of Kongo and Ndongo were sovereigns in their own right.3 If, as Aurelia Martín Casares argues in their chapter in Transatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico (edited by the brilliant Lissette Acosta Corniel), “the enslavement of Black Africans was in fact a commercially driven form of enslavement, as opposed to a war-motivated one,” then I can only conclude that Iberian relations with the continent were stained with a touch of the tarbrush.4 Especially after 1441, the year the first slave ship left the African continent flying a European flag and arrived in Lisbon.

Which is to say, the Portuguese came to Kongo, Angola, and then Ndongo to extract and they extracted on devastating terms. Even missionaries, who wanted souls at least as much as they wanted profit, could only imagine claiming souls through destruction of personhood. As Linda Heywood explains in Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen:

“In 1582, Father Barreira interviewed a very old, important religious official who was the spiritual authority in a province allied with the Portuguese. This official was believed to have the power to control the weather, ensure the health of the population, and provide other important services. Barreira was alarmed at the nganga’s appearance, noting that he was apparently living as a woman, at least outwardly--his hair was long and flowing, and he was dressed in a long robe “made from his hair” that was wrapped with many layers of cloth (panos) normally worn only by women. When Barreira confronted the nganga, he revealed that he had been born a man but the “demon” had told his mother that he would die immediately unless he “became a woman.” Barreira publicly shamed the local nganga by cutting off [her] hair and taking away [her] “superstitious” religious paraphernalia. He went even further, planting a cross where the nganga had been operating and immediately setting to work to build a church on the very spot where the nganga’s shrine had stood.”5

This is what it means to be a conquistador-settler: negotiate in bad faith, reject what you haven’t the grace to understand, and when you don’t get what you want, scorch the earth and blame your victims for your crimes.

In the end, the conquistador-settler cannot create. They can only destroy.

By 1617, the Portuguese had solidified their hold on the economies and politics of Kongo and set their sights on moving beyond Angola to subduing Ndongo to Portuguese rule. For three years, roughly 1617 through 1620, led by the newly arrived governor Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos and his son João, the Portuguese waged war on Ndongo. They mobilized their allies in Kongo and Angola. They mobilized and allied with the Imbangala, a ferocious group described by John Thornton as not quite an ethnicity, not quite a nation or kingdom, more of “a company, or several independent companies, of soldiers and raiders who lived entirely by pillage.”6 And they laid waste to cities, villages, and farmland.

Between 1618 and 1620, over fifty thousand Africans would be exported from Luanda alone. By 1621, Mendes de Vasconçelos, father and son, extracted a peace treaty from Ndongo that shredded the kingdom of its former sovereignty and committed them to the same slave trade they’d become victims of:

“In four years of fighting, Luis Mendes de Vasconçelos had brought a total of 190 sobas directly under Portuguese control. More than half of these men—109, to be precise—were subjugated during the campaigns led by Mendes de Vasconçelos’s sons, and each of them was required to pay four slaves to the Portuguese king.69 In addition, the governor imposed a tribute of one hundred slaves annually on Ngola Mbande and ordered the provincial lords and their kijikos to pay tribute and taxes as well.”

Then father and son left Angola and returned to Europe, never having to take stock of what they unleashed.

And what did they unleash?

I wonder if it is right or wrong to say the ones who hate us feel anger towards us. I wonder if the energy needed to marshal genocidal extraction and call it “just war” or business as usual or empire, I wonder if we understand those forces enough to name them. I wonder if naming it anger does the job.

The men who killed Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Keith Porter, and who kill and rape so many others...are they angry?

I don’t wonder if Mendes de Vasconcelos, father and son, felt anger. But sometimes I test my mettle as a historian and try to imagine, try to confront, try to settle into the grotesque, the abnormal, the sociopathic, the shredded human collage of bones and blood that is white mastery, European conquest and American empire.

Anger is a strange emotion. In this modern era, Black women aren’t supposed to be angry. But then again, we aren’t supposed to be anything. Black femme affect that transgresses is basically Black femme affect that exists--delicious, audacious, deliberate, and ratchet.

In the midst of trying to keep his kingdom, Ngola Mbande, did many terrible things. He murdered his sister’s son to keep him from succeeding the throne. He sterilized her and his sisters, to prevent any further challenges. Just men being men, yes? Or maybe the force of a curse unleashed?

Anger is a wonder. One of his sisters was named Njinga. Within three years, Njinga had maneuvered herself into leadership, claimed the throne, rejected the Portuguese’s demands for slaves, and launched a military and political career that would bring her down to us in history as the Warrior Queen of Ndongo and Matemba.

Njinga’s reign is too much for this offering, but in the reads below there is a profile written about her for the City of New York’s Hidden Voices of the Global African Diaspora curriculum. It is worth reading, sharing, using, teaching. Perhaps alongside Audre Lorde’s “Uses of Anger” or bell hooks’s Killing Rage or Kellie Carter Jackson’s award-winning We Refuce: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (a book I can’t seem to stop talking about).

Instead of Njinga’s rule, I wanted to use this offering to sit with 1619 and connect with Njinga on the brink, a woman who knew the worst that a woman can know. Who saw her land occupied by a capricious foreign force, her family turning against itself and and each other in a struggle to survive, herself and her sisters violated, and more and more. We can always imagine the more.

I want to sit with and see 1619 from the other side. We know what it begot on the eastern side of the Atlantic ocean, 20 odd Negroes and all that. But the Portuguese also unfurled another force of nature in Njinga, the daughter and sister of a king, who Ngola Mbande sent to meet the new Portuguese governor in 1621 and negotiate with him on behalf of her brother and Ndongo.

This girl burned with a righteous and scared and aggrieved fury.

This girl, despite having been betrayed by her own brother, still stood before the Portuguese and dared to fight. And plotted her revolt.

The Njinga of 1621 was pissed and petty. She had seen the Imbangala almost wipe her people from the face of the Earth. She held a grudge and it sounded like the cries of her infant son.

Angry? God yes. Devastated? Of course. But she did not fold up and retreat. She used the power she had to take action. She showed up and demanded a new world be made from the spirits of children she could never have. And then she fought like hell to bring that world into being.

There are forces being unleashed around us, realities being unveiled, and the physical threat grows every day--more for some than others. It is hard to see straight. Sometimes it is hard to see or trust anything.

Njinga couldn’t see her way to 1624 or 1644 either (or maybe she could).

But what she could and did do is step into the power she had as unsettled as that power felt, as contradictory and complicated and even conspiratorial as that power was and set her mind on the next thing that needed to be done. She didn’t know if she’d win, but what choice did she have?

What choice do we have? We can concede nothing. We are being called to create the next world.

Reads

• A Timeline of the Global African Diaspora (Hidden Voices)

• Queen Njinga Profile (Hidden Voices)

• West Central Africa Maps of the Slave Trade from David Eltis et al., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2010).

• Excerpt from Jean Barbot, An Abstract of a Voyage to Congo River (1700) from David Eltis et al., Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2010).

• “Angela’s Exodus Out of Africa” Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020).

• John K. Thornton, “Legitimacy and Political Power: Queen Njinga, 1624–1663,” The Journal of African History 32, no. 1 (1991): 25–40

• bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (Holt Paperbacks, 1996).

• Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Basic Books, 2024).

• Kali Gross, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times (Seal Press, 2024).

• Nikki M. Taylor, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

• Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State Press, 2022).

Resources

Map of the Slave Trade, 1500-1900 (Slave Voyages)

Luanda: Destinations of Slaves and Home Ports of Vessels Carrying Them, 1582-1850

This is offering #1 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

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Reading New Orleans poet and Black woman literary genius Brenda Marie Osbey, I can feel the ritual, the mystery of a world unspoken and tender, the dark power of the Black feminine, the audacity of Black girlhood across time and space.

I turned to her poetry as I struggled to find words to describe this season’s community offering. On the one hand, there’s the documentary record, the methodologies attributed to professional historians, and the dry objectivity of the academic. On the other hand, there are the names in the family Bible, the hands held together in prayer and grace, the fingers pressing knives into cutting boards, the lips loosened with good food and good drank. The “Did You Know” that comes out of nowhere and unfolds reams of history stretching back through states, borders, islands, and oceans.

How these two sides of “doing history” come together could be tagged “African American History 101” is obvious.

But doing our history (Black history) has a gravitas to it, a deeper charge, a headier weight than a classroom can hold. If you’re a professional historian, you know what I mean. How often have you described your journey and started at the foot of an elder or with a playground experience? If you’re a family or professional storyteller, you also know what it means to be griot, translator, or master/mistress/mixter of ceremonies at the family function. Funerals and holidays hate to see you coming because you will hold court all night and don’t let anyone try to get a word in!

Boundaries and rubrics fail in the face of Black narrative and archival brilliance, which is, simply put, our ability to stitch ourselves into Black being despite and in the face of weapons of war raised against us.

Enter Brenda Marie Osbey, literally “Writing the Words:”

“i will stitch open my eyes

i will stitch them to my fingers

and together

they will witness the history

and hand down the tale”

- Brenda Marie Osbey, from “Writing the Words,” in Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983, published in Callaloo in 1981)

In “Writing the Words,” the poet-narrator is witness, reader, researcher, writer, and historian. They see the everyday labor of a woman named sally, the everyday dismissal of her by a man named mohab who “could never love her.” They see the everyday parts of their lives, from the dirt washed off turnips to the city pavements. And in just three short pages, the poet-narrator reminds us that to be witness is also to “hand down the tale” is also to see even when you don’t want to see, is also to study in the tradition of ancestors who gobbled text, document, letter, and page, “reading by candlelight” even “after the lights turn off.”

For me, this is what it means to do history at our kitchen tables--it is about the document and the story, the tale and the text. It is about doing history in the name of and for the sake of witnessing. It is stitching open our eyes even when we don’t want to see the truth, and then pouring that truth through our fingers onto the page because our charge is to “hand down the tale.” In handing down the tale, we trust there is or will be someone there to receive it, a runner to pass our baton to. In that sense, the Black historian is a witness midwifing Black futures.

Stitch Open My Eyes delves into how we do that, how we do what we do.

Meet me back here in two weeks.

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