on my ideas for the research and offered me encouragement in the first stages of the project. Paul Finkelman, from the Albany Law School, was very helpful and made me think harder about the effects of the post-1808 illegal slave trade to the United States. Thanks to Mustafa Toure and Moulaye Keita of Dakar, Senegal, for research assistance, and to Judith Scales Trent, Alice Morton, Sylviane Diouf, Michael Lambek, and Erin Augis for readings of earlier versions. Pier Larson, Richard B. Allen, and James Armstrong were encouraging and generous in their commentaries and guidance to sources. I also thank Joseph Miller and fellow participants for fruitful hours at the National Endowment for the Humanities “Roots” seminar at the University of Virginia in 2007. Special thanks must go to the anonymous reviewers’ excellent critiques and suggestions, to the editors at Ohio University Press, and to Director Gillian Berchowitz for her faith in this project and her expert advice. I thank Mary Ann French, Jennifer Yanco, and Christine McVay, who kept me working for better ways to say what I sought to share. Thanks also to the Morgan family for the use of their ancestor’s image for the book.
This volume was preceded by a monograph that was the result of a memorable and unique scholar-community collaboration that took place in Ashland, Virginia, with the assistance of Professor Reber Dunkel of Randolph-Macon College, local historian Ann Cross, and the Clark, Winston, and Gordon families of Ashland and Hanover, Virginia. Through their efforts we received support from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Hanover County Black Heritage Society, and the Hanover County Historical Society to put on an exciting community event that brought diverse people together who shared a common history and the desire to learn more about the state’s ties to Madagascar. Dr. Diedre Badejo assured support from Kent State University’s Department of Pan-African Studies. At the Library of Congress, Joanne Zeller took the initiative to organize our Madagascar ancestor workshop. Likewise, the librarians at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, were of immense help. The Embassy of Madagascar staff, particularly Eulalie Ravelosoa, were consistently interested and supportive collaborators, and provided an invitation to the Gordon, Clark, and Winston descendants to the embassy for meaningful and fraternal evenings of discussion and Malagasy hospitality. My gratitude is here expressed to them, as well as to colleagues at the National Archives, and at the University of Antananarivo, in Madagascar, particularly to Dr. Julie Ratsimandrara, chair at the Center for Language Study of the Malagasy Academy.
Among those who have been critical to my understanding of Madagascar, Emmanuel Tehindrazanarivelo, is here sincerely acknowledged for his insightful and challenging discussions, his critical input in field trips in Madagascar and Frederick, Maryland, and his leadership in the Library of Congress sponsored Malagasy Ancestors project. Michael Lambek, Gwyn Campbell, and other colleagues at the Madagascar Workshop at the University of Toronto were very helpful in offering their commentaries and remarks on a working paper on the subject. My thanks also go to my maternal aunt Sheila Thomas, who led the way in the Mahomet family history research, followed by journalist and Columbia University professor and cousin, June Cross. I am indebted to librarians at the Virginia Historical Society, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia and at the Library of Congress, including but not limited to Angel Baptiste and Joanne Zeller. I extend my thanks to members of the Washington, D.C. Genealogical Association, and countless others who shared their stories with me. Finally, the completion of this work would not have been possible without the critical support and stimulating scholarly discussions of Andrea Smith, Ana Luhrs, and other colleagues at Lafayette College, where I have received funds for the completion of the manuscript and, as important, intellectual sustenance. I would like to acknowledge John Clark, data visualization GIS librarian of Skillman Library, for his expertise and discussions about maps, geography, and databases. My thanks go out to all of you, and to all the participants in this project, which has stretched over many years and many miles. I apologize for the unintended omission of any particular person who has helped me along the way.
I am very grateful for the awesome patience of my sons, Aziz, Pap Souleye, and Habib. They encouraged me through all phases of the research and book and gave me the space to think and write even as they engaged me with their own projects. They have been, as always, an inspiration.
Introduction
A Particular Ancestral Place
IN 1796 A WOMAN, reported to be a slave, managed to bring a court case regarding her captivity in Maryland. In the case, Negro Mary v. The Vestry of William and Mary’s Parish of October 1, 1796, the petitioner claimed to be the daughter of a woman who had been captured in Madagascar a generation before, enslaved in North America on her arrival. It is astounding, from a contemporary point of view, that a woman slave in 1796 would be so well informed regarding British law. Nevertheless, on the basis of the former status of her mother, the enslaved woman in Maryland argued that she should be set free. Madagascar, she said, “was not a place from which slaves [usually] were brought.” Her point of view was that Madagascar, and thus Malagasy people, should not be considered as legally imported labor, as in the normal course of the slave trade. It was true that under the New East India Act of 1721, American colonists could no longer legally obtain East India goods unless through Britain, or bring slaves from East India region ports.1 Unfortunately for Mary, the judge ruled that she could be set free only if she could provide documentation of the original status of her mother. Having thus responded, the judge cleverly avoided the question of whether “out-of-bounds” slavery in Madagascar was a sufficient charge for changing slave status. He knew it would have been exceedingly uncommon for a person such as the enslaved plaintiff to produce papers documenting her claim.2 Furthermore, the court argued that since it was known that “petty provinces” in Madagascar made war on each other to produce slaves for the European trade, they should normally fall under the same classification as slaves from the African continent.3
The case described above gives evidence of the sense of difference that may have been common among Malagasy slaves brought to the English colonies of North America and their compatriots who arrived after independence in the years before the Civil War. The fact that an enslaved woman in Maryland somehow had the wherewithal to take her petition for freedom to the court is remarkable; the fact that she called on her identity as a descendant of a Malagasy goes against most popular assumptions that a first-generation slave in the North American colonies would not identify by a parent’s pre-capture ethnicity, or “tribal” affiliation. Consequently, exploration of the conditions that would produce such an event can potentially tell us more about the process of creolization that took place on American plantations and more specifically, the experience of descendants of Malagasy slaves in that process.
In the following pages I have taken on the challenge of exploring the conditions that might have created or allowed a “Negro Mary,” or any self-identified Malagasy descendant who had slave or free progenitors in what has become the United States of America, to invoke Madagascar as a signifier of difference. This book was therefore written with the intention of contributing to the study of African diaspora communities in the Americas as well as the study of Malagasy diasporas. It presents an example of how Malagasy captives got caught up in the nexus of two major slaving networks of the modern era: the Indian Ocean and transatlantic slave trades. The Indian Ocean island of Madagascar stood at the intersection of these two systems, and the island furnished slaves at various times to the Indian Ocean world as well as to the Americas.
The dispersal of people from Madagascar throughout the Indian Ocean is well known, but little scholarly attention has been directed toward the trade of captives from Madagascar to the Americas.4 Thousands of slaves from Madagascar were exported to American ports, from Argentina to Canada, and the trade lasted from the seventeenth into the nineteenth century.5 One of the destinations of Malagasy captives during the eighteenth century was the Commonwealth of Virginia. Later, during the nineteenth century, Malagasy contract laborers, merchants, sailors, and slaves traveled to American ports and eventually became part of black communities.
Though my intent is to open a door on
