History Human Bondage

Human Bondage

New Historical marker recalls a dark chapter in the story of Northeast Florida

BY TIM GILMORE

Why is it that a person can stand where a profound historical event occurred and not feel its aftermath there, its lingering presence? After all, some events seem so large, so overwhelming, so world-changing, that they should leave traces in the landscape, markings. Some things, it seems, should haunt.

So when you stand in Old Town Fernandina and look out over the blue waters of the Amelia River, how can you not feel the suffering of the enslaved? For as a new marker commemorating the Middle Passage tells us, slaves once “comprised the predominant work force” of the area, which “became an important trade and smuggling region on the St. Johns and St. Marys Rivers, the border between the United States and Spanish Florida.”

The marker, dedicated by the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project on August 16th, acknowledges the identification of Amelia Island by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as one of 43, and the last of five in Florida, “documented U.S. Middle Passage arrival locations from New Hampshire to Texas.” An estimated 1.8 million of the 12.5 million slaves, 26 generations, shipped from Africa to North America, died during the crossing. Amelia Island served as a landing site and supply based for slave traders in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina seeking to get around the 1808 Constitutional ban on importing Africans. The marker names slave ships like the NS de Montserrat and the Jesus Nazareno, which “disembarked 351 slaves at the harbor located on this site.”

Such sites included several dramatically disturbing indicators of the magnitude of human trafficking here, says Ann Chinn, executive director for the markers project. “One indicator of the volume of human commerce,” she says, “is the existence of quarantine places where unmarketable captives were disembarked prior to official delivery.” She names Staten Island in New York, Savannah’s Tybee Island, New Orleans’s Algiers Point, Charleston’s three locations (Sullivan’s, James and Morris Islands) and Amelia Island’s Misery Point.

The markers project began in 2011 in response to writer Toni Morrison’s feeling “haunted by ancestors who had died during the Middle Passage,” Chinn says. “Simultaneously, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database was being developed. I simply began reviewing the data and realized that we could use it to acknowledge the history and encourage communities to commemorate these people who were for the most part unknown and forgotten.”

Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, which tells of a haunting that ensues after an enslaved mother kills her child, ranks high on any list of the greatest novels of the 20th century. In 1989, Morrison told The World Magazine that she wrote Beloved to address the lack of commemoration of slaves and their difficulties. “There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath or wall, or park or skyscraper lobby,” Morrison said. “There’s no 300-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road.” Indeed, what memorial could be “suitable” to the enormity?

Morrison was ahead of most academics in dealing with the intersection of history and memory. “Places, places are still there,” says Sethe in Beloved. “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in rememory, but out there, in the world.” Sethe says, “Nothing ever dies.” You can be walking down the road and “bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else.”

The dedication of a small bench beside the historical marker at Amelia Island is an example of history catching up with public memory, says Brittany Cohill, history professor at Jacksonville University, who steered the effort to bring a marker to Manhattan Beach in today’s Hanna Park. Until it was targeted by nearby real estate developers in the 1920s and ’30s, Manhattan Beach was the only strip of oceanfront in Jim Crow Florida that black people could visit legally.

“There’s this really interesting interplay,” says Cohill, “between the systematic study of history and public memory. It really boils down to whose collective memory is at the forefront, and the experience of the enslaved didn’t come into mainstream academic focus until the 1970s.” She refers to Yale historian David Blight, whose April 2002 article in Common Place, has become central to understanding the relationship between history and public memory.

“Memory is often owned, history interpreted,” Blight wrote. “Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised.” While the idea that the practice of history gets “revised” gets dumbed down in the political rhetoric of the “culture wars,” Cohill explains, “These events certainly happened, but weren’t given a place of privilege in the discipline. Sometimes collective memory, when owned by a certain group, does place demands on the profession and vice versa. So historians shift focus, more documents become available, and more people come to feel that their own heritage is important.”

Ann Chinn says that’s exactly what’s happened to enable the Middle Passage project to succeed. “Lately local historians, scholars and interested community residents have identified maritime records, personal journals, estate records and news articles that have fleshed out this history.”

The new availability of old sources has created a demand for much new historical work, but the demand has brought an eagerness to do the work too. “It has required a deeper and committed dive into historical records,” Chinn says. “Now these researchers have a specific focus—Africans arriving, orders placed and descriptions of captive people. Much of this information previously was not considered important and in some cases was considered tarnishing to the reputations of businesses, nations and individuals.”

Chinn says most of the response has been positive. Acknowledging public memory, she says, “is empowerment, for sure, and that is considered by some, not all, a threat.” The markers project centers its work, not on slavery itself, “but the traditional human practice of honoring ancestors,” Chinn continues. “We stress that we are commemorating and placing value on people who until now have been omitted, dismissed, considered inconsequential or unconnected to us—descendants, community and nation.” u

Sounds of Music

One of Jacksonville’s most historic neighborhoods is inviting everyone to come and sit a spell. Springfield Preservation and Revitalization hosts its eighth annual Jacksonville Porchfest on Saturday, November 5. A roster of more than 25 bands—Junco Royals, Groove Coalition, Folk is People among others—and performing artists is slated for musical sets in Sesquicentennial Park (1527 Main Street), as well as several front porches in the surrounding neighborhood. In addition, there will be food trucks and dozens of arts and crafts vendors. The event runs from noon to 8 PM. Lawn chairs and picnic blankets are welcome. Admission is free.