photographer and videographer from the newspaper had gone over two weeks earlier to begin photographing and making film of Bence Island. Joseph Opala, who was to be our guide and translator, also had gone over early to hire men who lived on neighboring islands to clear the ruins of the fortress on Bence of their dense vegetation.
My friends at the newspaper asked how I’d persuaded our financially conservative paper to spend thousands on a story that happened 250 years ago. I could tell that many of them thought slavery was a story I needed to get over. The earlier investigation had been published two years before, and the book that followed was nearly finished. “Everything in Connecticut isn’t about slavery,” a columnist said to me, adding that his ancestors were nineteenth-century immigrants and had nothing to do with slavery. “Are you going to write about women?” a reporter asked. “Or how about modern-day slavery?” They were good questions, I knew, but nothing in my twenty-first-century life seemed as important as decoding these eighteenth-century ships’ logs.
And the story of slavery was changing me. Those stolen people had suffered so long ago, and I could not find any place where their particular story was told. Who would speak for them, and why had a place not been made for them in our history? At our hands, they had been sold from the only home they knew into killing labor and suffering, and I was ready to do Jane Addams’s memory work. I couldn’t reconcile yet, but I was plenty ready to sift.
Though newspapers are portrayed in movies as freewheeling and democratic, they are, in my experience, intensely hierarchical and driven by favoritism. In terms of newsroom capital, I didn’t have much. I had been working for New England newspapers for twenty-eight years, and at the Hartford Courant for more than half that time. I’d spent years writing and editing features about homes, gardens, and literary figures, and if people knew me at all, it was for a 1998 series that I’d written about what makes a marriage strong. It was my bad luck that a new editor in chief had joined the newspaper the week the series ran, and he was a hard-news junkie. He hated seeing soft stories on “One,” and I heard that he had described the series at an editors’ meeting as “longer than most marriages.” The newspaper ombudsman wrote a column slamming it as a waste of precious page-one space.
I was nobody’s idea of an investigative reporter. I was just grateful to be included, and I knew that when this project was done, I would probably be assigned to the home and gardening section, writing about crabgrass and hostess gifts. (Within months, I was.)
But in an odd moment of fate that was seeming less and less accidental, a group of lost black men, women, and children had come into my hands, and had made me responsible for bringing their story back. On that day in the library when I had the powerful waking dream of the children being handed up into the slave ship, I realized that I was crying, and a sympathetic genealogist across the table pushed a box of Kleenex toward me and said, “Your people?” And I thought, they are.
Both the captives and their captors began to appear at the edge of my dreams and followed me through the day. In a dream that recurred, I saw a slave ship leaving New London harbor, but I could not read the name on the transom as it sailed away from its anchorage. Looking down from the ship’s high stern, a man in a long coat raised his three-cornered hat to me, and then looked out toward Long Island Sound.
I began to believe that something was guiding this project, and that it was not visible, or any part of Earth. From my friend sending me the news clipping, to the scholar who knew about Bence Island, to the newspaper’s financial support of a backbencher with no reputation, a kind of divine intervention seemed to be at work. When I stepped off the plane in Sierra Leone’s Freetown International Airport, and then waited for hours in a baking airplane hangar where sunlight poured in through hundreds of bullet holes in the tin roof, I knew I was lucky.
HISTORY FOR AN ABANDONED PLACE
And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.
JOSEPH CONRAD
From the air, Bence Island looks so small. It is hard to imagine the enormity of pain it has witnessed. Even when you are on the ground, the island feels small. Only from the water, in a small boat, does it seem to loom above you. The tall ruins of the last fortress, built in 1796 near the end of the island’s long career as a depot for the slave trade, appear to be hiding amid the tall trees. They are there, and then not there.
Bence Island is visible from a hilltop near Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s wracked and refugee-filled capital city. The island seems to curve within the protection of the vastly larger Tasso Island, which also formed part of the slaving archipelago centuries ago.
Early explorers often remarked on the beautiful haze of lavender and green that seems to envelop this part of the Sierra Leone River, and when I first saw tiny Bence in that lavender distance, I did not believe my eyes. The long and haunted story of that small place had become so deeply a part of me, and I had imagined it so often, that I could not believe I was finally seeing it from a hillside in Freetown, nothing between us except some air and water. I thought, I have come so far for you.
It felt like my body was full of tears. I could not bear to leave the hillside, even after Tom Brown, our photographer, and Alan Chaniewski, our videographer, had made their pictures and film.
In a series of letters published in 1788, John Matthews, a former British naval officer who was setting up a private business for trading in slaves on the Sierra Leone coast, described the harbor at Freetown and the river that leads up to Bence Island. It was what I saw, exactly.
Photographed from a hillside in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, Bence Island is the small island in the center. The islands around it were part of a slaving archipelago during the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant
“In coming in from the sea in the dry season, few prospects can exceed the Sierra-Leone river,” wrote Matthews. “Before you is the high land of Sierra-Leone rising from the Cape with the most apparent gentle ascent. Perpetual verdure reigns over the whole extent, and the variegated foliage of the different trees, with the shades [shadows] caused by the projecting hills and unequal summits, add greatly to the beauty of the scene.”
This part of Sierra Leone’s coast includes equatorial jungle that feels more dense than the densest New England forest. It is verdant in a way that is hard for Westerners to imagine, and the air is so thick it seems to lie upon your skin. Having grown up in mid-eighteenth-century New London, Dudley Saltonstall would have been familiar with a breeze off the harbor, stone houses, a white steepled church and pasturelands; the African coast would have seemed like the shore of another world, a distant latitude from the burnished leather globe in his father’s study.
Englishman John Matthews was planning to establish a slave trading business in Sierra Leone when he first saw the entrance to the Sierra Leone River. This engraving was published in his book A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa, late in the eighteenth century. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
The next morning, we motored upriver in a small boat borrowed from the American Embassy. The eighteen-mile trip felt like an outing, the wind cool on my face because Gabriel, our pilot, kept the boat zipping along. This stretch of the river is filled with shoals and shifting sandbars, so ships in the era of the logbooks would have picked up a black pilot at a point of land in Freetown called Cape
