World slave experience that helps us better understand local histories of African Americans, these stories are also part of a larger history of the relationship of North America to the Indian Ocean. This relationship started during the era of pirates, in the seventeenth century, and peaked much later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, with Yankee traders and the pull of the spice trade, British maritime expansion and control of the “Indies,” and the establishment of American diplomatic and commercial representation at Majunga (Mahajanga), in northwestern Madagascar, in the 1820s. Official consulates later served the United States in Antananarivo, in central Madagascar, in the late nineteenth century.
The narratives are discussed in the context of the era of the transatlantic slave trade and shortly thereafter, focusing on the period between 1719 (when large numbers of Malagasy slaves were imported into the Commonwealth of Virginia) and 1850 (when there were still incidents of foreign slave smuggling into mainland America, and indentured servants arriving to the Americas from the Indian Ocean region).6 After 1850 (and until the mid-twentieth century), most Malagasy people who arrived in the United States or Europe were either Christian refugees traveling under the auspices of church missionary societies or sailors on steamships, and that history is beyond the scope of the present volume. This volume begins with the rash of entrepreneurial forays to the western Indian Ocean carried out by American colonists and ends in the period when Britain was a major maritime power and the War of 1812 was past.
For this story of Malagasy slaves and early immigrants to the Americas, I draw on two kinds of sources: historical documentation and contemporary narratives of remembrance of ancestors from Madagascar. In order to take full advantage of these two compelling but disparate ways of looking at history, the book has a rather unusual approach to treating the historical and ethnographic material gathered in the course of research. In order to make clear which information is drawn from documented historical accounts or from family oral tradition, chapters begin with a review of the available information in the historical record and are followed by a section devoted to family oral traditions and their analysis, presenting ethnographic commentary on the style, content, and uses of these narratives.
The text suggests the possibility that slaves and early free-black immigrants from Madagascar, as well as their descendants in Virginia and a few other places in the American South, remembered, reinvented, and imagined a particular geographic site they held in common. It is also about the pervasive sense of loss that contemporary families express about their separation from an ancestral geography that is symbolized, for them, by a specific ancestor from a specific place. I explore ethnic negotiation and identity formation among Malagasy newcomers to North America and their Afro-Malagasy, creole descendants by drawing on family narratives that are woven from memories and stories passed down by successive generations. With family ideas of a particular ancestral place came an allegiance to a particular history and to an inheritance of stories that describe a sense of difference from other families, and other stories, in the African American community.
My intent is to provide a reflection on the process of creolization that led to African American identity by following one strand: the legacy of slaves and early free immigrants from Madagascar. Whether the legacy I mention above is direct descent or creations of assumed genealogies, it is a received notion deriving from ideas and thoughts of Madagascar. The approach here is not statistical but rather focuses on historical context and memory. It addresses the problem of family historical narratives as received testimonies of a past that has been embroidered and otherwise transformed in narratives stretching over successive generations. The meaning of narratives of Madagascar is explored, therefore, as an example of the complexity of memory work as it affects group identity.
Identity and the Question of Authenticity
It is a difficult, almost impossible enterprise to corroborate the genealogies suggested in the stories collected, because there are few existing records linking any Malagasy slave or early immigrant with particular African American descendants, although there are many African Americans who claim Malagasy descent, as “Negro Mary” did. There is, thus, a dialogue that continues throughout this volume between ethnographic analysis of the storytellers and their narratives, on one hand, and historical documentation, on the other. Today’s family narratives, as I see them, are not a recent response to public memory enterprises but, on the contrary, are built on remnants and reconstructions of much earlier narratives.7
Family oral traditions offer a unique way of understanding how people experience history. The archives, which offer multiple sources of slave lists, do not reveal the transition that most slaves or early black immigrants experienced between their ethnic identities and their newly appointed racial identities. For example, while names are by nature meant to identify (a person, a thing), in the case of slaves they also hid, or even erased, personal identities. In North America once the slave received a name—his or her “slave name”—that person’s past identity and place of origin was effectively lost to future generations, because African and Malagasy names suggested linguistic or ethnic origin. Moreover, origin as a criterion of reference quickly went into disuse by slave owners (usually with the first country-born generation). If a document such as a diary or journal ever recorded the naming of individuals in a group of slaves from Madagascar, then the descendants of each slave might yet be traceable in plantation records. Unfortunately, no such record has yet been found, and records of this sort are notoriously rare for any slaves in North America. Moreover, slaves coming to the Americas generally could not read or write in English and rarely in Arabic8 and, thus, did not leave their own written records. This fact seems apparent, but the simplicity of this problem has often led to its invisibility, particularly for those outside the academy who want to understand or contribute to African American discourse on identity, such as the descendants of slaves. Nor has the existence of African American stories of Malagasy ancestors been common knowledge. It is not surprising, then, that this is the first scholarly publication to attempt to situate ancestor stories of Madagascar told by contemporary African Americans in a historical context.
It is always difficult to find material evidence that demonstrates the accuracy of oral histories in the case of illiterate societies, and this is especially true of disempowered communities. How does one corroborate an oral tradition that has been passed down by a repressed minority? In this case, I have chosen to present such narratives chronologically so that historical evidence provides a background, even though there are few documents that directly substantiate Malagasy origins. But family oral-history narrators do seek to tell a chronologically based story, and the purpose of the story is to frame the present in relation to the past, specifically, a shared family past. This chronological feature exposes a desire for coherence and logic—an attempt to order the past, to signal what should be remembered and, hence, to give meaning to the present.
The infamous Middle Passage was not long enough for people to forget who they were: the average time from West Africa across the Atlantic was two and a half to three months, and from the western Indian Ocean about three months more. Over generations, people did forget much about where they came from, and it must be imagined that remembrance was in many ways painful and underlined the powerlessness people felt. Yet if family oral history is any indication, then within the cultural aggregate that has been the African American community, traces of ethnic particularities from diverse sources and very specific experiences remain in perpetually new and ever-changing configurations, for example, as embodied practices, as folk tales, or family historical narratives. The Madagascar example, based on a less known minority population among North American slave imports, provides circumstantial evidence of how ethnic or national clusters from Africa and its islands responded to the imperative to integrate into existing black communities, enslaved or free, in the New World.
My research has shown that authenticity is not a concern of the family oral narrative insomuch as families accept that they are not pure Malagasy, but do argue that they are of Malagasy descent. Their focus, which they clearly admit, is on their identities as people of a mixed heritage that includes an ancestor from Madagascar. This is an aspect of the narratives that is approached in various ways throughout the book, as we seek to understand
