HALO - Mark Steven Greenfield

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

MARK STEVEN GREENFIELD HALO APRIL 30 - JULY 9, 2022

Califia California’s namesake, Califia (c. 1510) is the mythical Black warrior Queen who raised a menacing army of Amazons on the fabled island of California, a utopia brimming with pearls and gold. Commanding a Naval fleet and an aerial flock of five-hundred winged Griffins, the pagan Queen is a fierce adversary for the Crusaders but is eventually conquered, converted to Christianity and married off to a chivalrous Spaniard.

She returns to California with her husband to establish a new Christian dynasty as further adventures ensue.

The literary character is from Castillian, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th century epic poem, Las Sergas de Esplandián. When Spanish explorers, under the command of Hernán Cortés, learned of an island off the coast of western Mexico rumored to be ruled by Amazon women, they named it California.

Rewards Program Rewards Program celebrates and memorializes all of those whose names we will never know, whose unique lives have vanished under slavery’s inhumanity and indifference. The four anonymous women toiling in the cotton fields are wreathed in reverential golden crowns of light honoring their memories, though their individual struggles and triumphs are forever lost to us..They also serve to remind us of the biases of western academic historiography, which often determined who is admitted and who is omitted from its pages.

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Zumbi dos Palmares Zumbi dos Palmares (1655 – 1695) Zumbi was a pioneering AfroBrazilian resistance leader and today a symbol of liberation from Brazil’s Portuguese colonists. Thought to be a descendent of central African royalty, he became a military leader to a ‘quilombo,’ or selfsustaining community of escaped slaves referred to as ‘Maroons.’

Marie-Joseph Angélique Marie-Joseph Angélique (c. 1705-1734) was a Portuguese-born slave who was tried, convicted and hanged forsetting her owner’s home on fire, which subsequently burnt much of what was Old Montreal.

Today, this history is being contested and it is theorized that she was used as a scapegoat for the crime; revealing much about the treatment of slaves in Canada at the time. A competing theory is that she was guilty of arson in an attempt to escape enslavement. Today, she has become a symbol of Black resistance and freedom.

Rebecca Cox Jackson Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871) was a free Black woman, best known for her religious feminism and activism as well as for her autobiography, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. After having a spiritual awakening during a thunderstorm, she divorced her husband for not teaching her to read and write - viewing literacy as a spiritual gift from God. She miraculously learned both and became a minister in the Shaker community ministering primarily to Black women.

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Solitude of Guadalupe Solitude (c. 1772-1802) was a resistance fighter and heroine in the fight against slavery born in the French West Indies on the island of Guadeloupe in the late 18th century. Her mother was an enslaved woman from Africa, and her father was a sailor who raped her mother at sea when she was transported from Africa to Guadalupe.

Experiencing the abolition of slavery in 1794, she joined a ‘Maroon’ community until Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery in 1799.

Solitude fought in the slave resistance before she was caught and imprisoned by the French. Due to the fact that she was pregnant, she was spared hanging until one day after giving birth.

Moses Williams Former slave and arguably the first African-American artist, Moses Williams (c.1775 - c.1825). Within the conscript of a traditional circular composition or tondo, Williams is framed amongst a crowd of silhouette portraits of his white patrons. The material and technique of cut-paper profiles was a popular method of souvenir portraiture during the 19th century which made them accessible tokens for a new leisure class seeking novel diversions in conspicuous consumption. Utilizing a new technology, the physiognotrace, Moses traced his sitter’s profiles which he would then painstakingly cut out. Ironically, as an infant Williams and his family were traded to Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale as partial payment for a plantation owner’s portrait. In 1780, Williams’ parents were freed by Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery. At the time, Williams was eleven years old and those under the age of twenty-eight were required to remain in bondage, thus, Williams grew up amongst Peale and his seventeen children. Peale instructed his progeny in fine-art painting whilst relegating Williams to what was considered a lower craft, that of papercut-outs. Once of age, Williams was freed and went on to establish a relatively successful career as a silhouettist at Peale’s museum, however with the advent of photography in the early 1840’s, his singular professional training was rendered obsolete.

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

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WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

Redoshi Redoshi (c.1848-1937) was born in Benin where she was captured by slavers at age twelve around 1860 whereafter she was transported to the U.S. on the last illegal slave ship to make the transatlantic voyage. She was reported to be the daughter of a regional chief of the Dahomey people. Redoshi is the only known female transatlantic slavery survivor to have been filmed and interviewed for a newspaper, living to age 89 or 110 (reports conflict.) survived the journey over, slavery, the imposition of Jim Crow laws and enough into the Great Depression that she became acquainted with people active in the Civil Rights Movement. Her life was recounted by Zora Neal Hurston in an article written in 1928.

Henry “Box” Brown Born enslaved in Virginia, Henry “Box” Brown (c.1815-unknown) escaped to freedom through his ingenuity which he attributed to being a miracle; he designed a plan to have himself mailed in a wooden crate to abolitionists in Pennsylvania. Brown went on to become a lecturer, activist, magician, mesmerist and would have his autobiography published. Additionally, he created a ‘moving panorama’ (a precursor to film) about slavery which he traveled extensively with to proselytize the abolition of slavery. The exact date and location of his death are unknown.

Black Herman Black Herman (1892-1934) was the stage name of Benjamin Rucker, the most celebrated black magician of his time. His performances subversively syncretized secular theater arts with traditional West African healing practices rendered by spiritual magicians known as Conjurers, Hoodoos and Root Doctors. Echoing elements of this ancestral religiosity, Herman effaced the boundaries between the secular and the sacred. Influenced by the nationalist activist Marcus Garvey, Herman infused ideas of independent Black states into his stage show and sold anti-racist talismans to protect his followers.

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Queen Nzingha Mbande Inheriting rule of Ndongo (present day Angola) in 1624, Queen Nzingha Mbande (1583-1663) allied herself with the Portuguese which simultaneously halted Portuguese and African slave raiding in the region. In order to achieve this, Nzingha had herself baptized with the Portuguese colonial governor serving as godfather. Betrayed by the Portuguese she was forced to flee to and reorganize her militia. She adopted a form of military organization known as kilombo, in which youths renounced family ties and were raised communally in militias. By the time of her death, she had reigned for 37 years and developed her region into a formidable commercial state. Today, she is remembered in Angola as the Mother of Angola and protector of her people, known to carry a hatchet which she knew how to use into battle.

Balthazar One of the three biblical ‘magi’ or ‘wise men,’ King Balthazar gave the highly prized gift of liquid myrrh to Jesus upon his birth. Balthazar was an African King and described in the 8th century by Pseudo-Bede as being "[of] black complexion, with [a] heavy beard,” and yet it would be one thousand years before artists began representing him as a Black African. It was only around 1480/90 that his depiction as a Black African emerged, coinciding with when the Portuguese slave trade began on the west coast of Africa. In Greenfield’s depiction an observatory alludes to his scholarship in astronomy and the star of Bethlehem which guided the Three Wise Men to the manger.

The Tragedy of Margaret Garner Margaret Garner (unkown-1858) was an enslaved African American woman who escaped slavery with her family by crossing the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. She was apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. She killed her daughter and attempted to kill her three other children and herself rather than being returned to slavery. She was tried, but because she was considered property and not a person, she was ultimately released. Her story served as the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

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Black Caesar Black Caesar was a pirate who operated in the Florida Keys during the golden age of piracy in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s. There were many pirates of African origin, mostly liberated from captured slave ships. Caught between a choice of perpetual slavery on land or freedom through lawlessness on the high seas; aboard these vessels, black pirates could vote, bear arms, and receive an equal share of the booty. A pirate ship was one of the few places a black man could attain power and wealth in the Western Hemisphere.

As legend has it, Caesar was an African chieftain deceptively lured onto a slave ship which wrecked in a storm off the Florida coast.

Being one of only two survivors, he amassed a considerable fortune by posing as a shipwrecked sailor and robbing vessels offering their assistance, he ultimately began attacking ships on open sea. Black Caesar served as Blackbeard’s lieutenant aboard Queen Anne’s Revenge until Blackbeard’s death and his capture by Virginia colonial authorities and was hanged in Williamsburg in 1718.

Celia Robert Newsom was a Missouri slave owner in the 1850’s. After his wife died, he turned his attention to a fourteen year old enslaved girl named Celia. He saw her as nothing more than a sex object, raping her repeatedly for years. She bore him one, possibly two children and was pregnant again in 1855. She was in a relationship with another enslaved man named George and it was unclear who the father might be. George urged her to resist Newsom’s advances and she appealed to his daughters to intercede on her behalf but to no avail. One night when Newsom came to her cabin, she bashed in his skull with a log. That night she burned his body in the fireplace and carefully crushed his bones. The next morning she convinced his grandson to scatter his ashes by offering him some walnuts. After a few days of questioning, she finally confessed. The trial lasted for three months because Missouri law allowed for a woman to kill anyone who tried to take them by force. Because she was a slave it was determined that she was property and not a person. Her child was stillborn and she was hanged.

WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

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WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY

Xica da Silva Francisca da Silva de Oliveira (c. 1732 – 1796) is popularly referenced as “the slave who became a queen,” and gained wealth and power despite being born into slavery.

By utilizing what she could to take advantage of the few possibilities that the system offered her she aimed to diminish the stigma that color and slavery imposed on her and elevating the social status of her offspring.

She was born a parda (brown), a term used in the former Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas to refer to the triracial descendants of Southern Europeans, Amerindians and West Africans. Unlike other colonizers, the Portuguese in the 18th century did not permit men to bring their families with them and as a result, there was far more mixing between disparate racial and socioeconomic castes. This also afforded the offspring produced a greater chance of being born free of slavery.

Partially due to love affairs and children born between Portuguese men and African and/or mulatta slave women, freed former slaves were predominately female.

Stereotypes about non-white women were abundant during the colonial period and while gender, race and color worked together to systemically disadvantage Black women, some individuals—such as Xica—used their perceived hyper-sensuality to invert gender and power relations. Once socially mobile, these women were seen as even more dominant than their masters.

Sex facilitated access to freedom and concubinage with white men offered advantages to black women because, once free, they reduced the stigma of color and of slavery for themselves and for their descendants.

Xica’s relationship with João Fernandes de Oliveira - a judge and diamond mine owner who freed her - was a scandal in colonial Brazilian society, and elevated her to become one of the most powerful women in colonial America. They had thirteen children together but never legalized their relationship as it would have been taboo.

He left for Portugal one day, never to return after which Xica had to fend for herself and their progeny. Her legacy is one of romanticized myth conflated with historical accounts, a larger than life figure who broke down social moré’s and proved the impossible.

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St. Moses the Black, aka Abba Moses the Robber Born in Ethiopia around 330 A.D., he worked as a servant to a government official in Egypt until he was dismissed on suspicion of theft and murder. With few options open to him, he became a leader of a gang of bandits who terrorized parts of the Nile Valley.

On one occasion a foiled robbery attempt forced him to take refuge among a group of monks in the desert near Alexandria. He was converted to the monastic life, but had difficulty giving up his old ways. He would fight with anyone he deemed to be a threat to either him or his fellow brothers and it is reported that he overpowered a group that had come to rob the monastery and hauled them before the Abbot for his disposition. The other monks took the thieves in and converted them as well.

Moses came to fully adopt the contemplative life and vowed to remain non-violent.

In 405 A.D. it was learned that group of Berbers were planning an attack at the monastery. The brothers were preparing to defend themselves, but Moses forbade it, instructing them to retreat rather than taking up weapons. His feeling was that as a former gangster it was appropriate that he die a violent death citing: “All that take the sword, will perish by the sword.” He and seven others were martyred by the berbers on July 1st.

Medicine Woman

The Medicine Woman’s (fl. Late 1400’s) was a healer living in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic on the bifurcated island of Hispaniola, with Haiti to the west.

She persuaded officials to construct the first hospital in the America’s which opened in 1503 and which she directed. Yet, there is no record of her name, only those of the early Spanish politician’s who funded it.

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Estevanico

Estevanico (c.1500-unkown) was the first African to explore North America.

A Moroccan slave, he accompanied an expedition of Spanish explorers from Florida along the Gulf of Mexico, into the southwestern United States and eventually Mexico City. He was the first westerner to reach the legendary “Seven Cities of Cíbola” in northern Mexico, Indigenous American pueblos legendary for their mythical riches. Captured by Native Americans, he escaped and became a “medicine man,” or priestly healer.

His death has been disputed and it has been suggested that rather than being killed by the Zuni tribe in 1539 as previously recorded, he faked his death in order to regain his freedom.

Escrava Anastácia A great deal of mystery surrounds Anastácia’s origins. Some claim she was born of royal lineage in Africa, while others suggest she was born in Brazil.

All accounts agree that she was a slave of exceptional beauty with arresting blue eyes. She was purported to have possessed remarkable healing abilities and a number of miracles are attributed to her. She was very cruelly treated by her masters and was made to wear a muzzle-like facemask and heavy iron collar. The reasons for this punishment vary from trying to incite other slaves escape, to the claim that she resisted rape by her master, to a mistress jealous of her beauty. After a prolonged period of suffering she died of tetanus brought on by the slave collar. It is claimed that she healed the son of the master and mistress and forgave them as she died. There have been repeated attempts to have her canonized as a saint, but the Catholic Church refuses to acknowledge her existence, and has had her image removed from all church properties in Brazil. Nonetheless Anastácia has many devoted followers among the poor and disenfranchised, and shrines to her can be found throughout the country.

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Yasuke Yasuke was the first foreign-born man to reach samurai warrior status in 16th century Japan under the daimyo Oda Nobunaga, the first of the three unifiers of Japan. He arrived in Kyoto in 1579 in the service of an Italian Jesuit missionary and in under one year was in Nobunaga’s ranks. Having some command of the Japanese language allowed Yasuke to converse with Nobunaga and tell the tales of his travels which intrigued the feudal lord; . There are no records as to Yasuke’s date or country of birth. Many historians propose he was from Mozambique, others suggest Ethiopia or Nigeria and it is contested as to whether or not he was ever a slave. Nobunaga was captured by a rival warlord in 1582 when he committed the ritual suicide, seppuko; prior to this, he had asked Yasuke to decapitate him and to deliver his head and sword to his son which was a great honor. Little is known about Yasuke after this, it is believed he was exiled by the winning faction, however he has been forever memorialized in a Japanese children’s book Kuro-suke (kuro meaning “black” in Japanese) by Kurusu Yoshio.

Richard Potter

Richard Potter (1783-1835) was a magician, hypnotist and ventriloquist in early nineteenth century New England and is widely considered the first African American celebrity. He was born in Massachusetts to a black mother who had been captured by slavers along the Guinea coast and a white father. He married a Native American woman and had three children. His son Henry also called Harry, died at age seven.

His next son Richard Jr. had less success than his father as a magician.

Richard Sr. was a Mason of the first African Lodge No. 459, purchased land and built a large estate near Andover, New Hampshire. When he died in 1835 his will dictated that he be buried standing upright.

Potter’s story intrigued Harry Houdini, who included Potter in his popular Magazine of Magic. His life also inspired Grace Metalious’ character Samuel Peyton in the novel Peyton Place (1956) as the town's founding father.

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