Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

102 passengers arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. A year earlier, the White Lion landed, filled with 20-30 Angolans. Everyone learns about the Mayflower. Few Americans ever learn about the White Lion, although Hannah-Jones calls it “classically American” (4). America celebrates one ship but erases the other. There are no holidays about the White Lion.

In a July 4, 1852 address, Frederick Douglass stated that he could not reconcile the anniversary of the country’s independence when his own people were not free. He asked, “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?” (5). In his book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois asks, “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” (6).

Regardless of whether the fact is inconvenient, America’s story starts with the arrival of the White Lion, according to Hannah-Jones.

Records show that Africans arrived in America as early as 1526, traveling with Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon. Africans had already been in the Caribbean for a century prior to 1607.

By 1624, the slave trade was in full swing. Slave ships brought Africans comprising many different tribes, including the “Yoruba, Wolof, and Mandinka people” (8). In Africa, many tribes fought the Europeans who came to take enslaved people and proselytize.

Asante assigns archetypal roles to the conglomeration of enslaved Africans brought to America: recorder, interpreter, creator, advancer, maintainer, and memorializer of events. Telling the African American’s story would require participation from each role.

Oluo writes that while her mother is white, she considers herself Black. She does not consider herself even half-white.

She gives a brief history of Hugh Davis, a white man who was whipped in the 1630s colonies for sleeping with a Black woman. He wasn’t whipped for defiling her but for defiling himself and whiteness. Anti-Black racism did not come “fully formed” (11) to the New World. It slowly evolved and accelerated after the Davis whipping. His punishment illustrates the fear that whiteness could be diluted and made impure by mingling with the African race. Davis’s punishment reflected a systemic need for white survival, not a mere preference for one race over another.

Oluo tells her mother, “You cannot become part-white” (12). Any time that a mixed-race child is born, no one describes the child as part-white. She remembers people looking at her mother in confusion when they saw her dark-skinned children, wondering if a Black man had taken advantage of her.

In 1640, only ten years after Hugh Davis’s punishment, a Black woman was whipped because a white man impregnated her. In a decade, the blame shifted from the white man to the Black woman. White supremacists used these attitudes to justify segregation by 1800.

Oluo writes that she can’t claim any vestige of whiteness for herself until the attitudes that led to Davis’s whipping are gone.

A man named Rolfe reminisces about an African woman nicknamed Go-Go. He took her from Bermuda and brought her to the Jamestown settlement in present day Virginia. He teaches her everything about tobacco, even though he traded her twin sister away for tobacco seeds. Pocahontas gives her the nickname Go-Go, short for a Jogahoh, a spirit with secret knowledge of agriculture and cultivation.

In 1635 Rolfe is dead and Go-Go is elderly. The Indigenous Americans tell English invaders who marvel at the New World’s bountiful tobacco that Go-Go made the plants grow. In 1636, Go-Go watches as Englishmen sell one of her granddaughters to pay their tobacco tax.

Stevenson writes that one of the worst abuses suffered by captured Africans was “the persistent assault on gendered identities as part of the effort to erase captives’ humanity, self-worth, and traditional roles within their indigenous cultures and communities” (18).

In 1643 the Virginia General Assembly enacted legislation rendering Black women “tithable” (18). This meant slave owners were taxed for their Black women if they were older than 16. The slaveholders then made the women responsible for the taxes. The law separated Black women from other colonial women to the greatest degree yet. In order to pay for their taxes, Black women were given increased workloads to justify the slave-owner’s investment in them. Single, free black women could rarely pay their tax. They were poorer candidates for marriage, since they brought this additional financial burden.

These laws “led to the broad public’s imagining of Blackwomen as workhorses, whores, and emasculating matriarchs” (19).

Ruffin writes from the first-person viewpoint of Anthony Johnson. He goes to the water on his land and remembers the hold of the ship. He calls arriving on the shore of America his rebirth.

He is married to a woman named Mary. He bought Mary’s freedom and then his own. His son Walter calls him because a white man named John Parker is in their tobacco patch. Anthony pays Robert 40 shillings for a calf, a wedding gift for his daughter. Robert refuses to sign the contract, saying, “I will not sign a deed for the likes of you!” (24). When Anthony insists, Robert kills the calf with his dagger and leaves. Anthony imagines that he is back in the hold of a slave ship, this time with his children.

In 1649 there were 300 Black people in Virginia. The full-blown enterprise of slavery hadn’t fully formed yet. However, shifts in the family unit were evolving. For most enslaved people, being captured and taken to America meant splitting up their families. Creating new families in America was never guaranteed, because family members could be sold at an owner’s whim.

Mortality rates were high in the colonies, and the life expectancy of slaves was lower than for the colonists. Many Black people became caregivers of children who were not theirs.

Emmanuel Pietersen and his wife Dorothe—who were both Black and free—raised a friend’s child to age 18. When they tried to gain legal guardianship of him, they cited the fact that Dorothe had witnessed the boy’s Christian baptism. The council ruled that the boy would be able to inherit from his parents even though he was Black. The key was in Emmanuel’s language about his Christian baptism. Most Europeans at the time believed that one Christian could not rightfully enslave another.

Christian Baptism became a loophole that guaranteed freedom. However, in 1656 the Dutch Reformed Church quit baptizing Black people. Virginia laws evolved in suit, officially removing baptism as a means of freedom to “slaves by birth” (28).

Parker writes, “In history textbooks and in popular memory, the enslavement of people of African descent is often depicted as an unfortunate yet unavoidable occurrence in the otherwise glorious history of the American republic” (30). Parker resists this interpretation, saying that slavery was both evil and avoidable. He cites the 1655 case Johnson v. Parker as an egregious example of worsening labor practices in the colonies.

Anthony Johnson arrived in 1621 as a captive. Over the next 30 years he bought his freedom, married, and acquired land and servants, including a man named John Casor, who was also African. Casor claimed that he was working under contract as a servant, not an enslaved person. Once he believed that he had fulfilled the terms of his contract, he wanted his freedom. He claimed that Johnson unethically bound him for seven years longer than the contract stipulation.

There was a recent precedent of a Black indentured servant facing challenges in gaining his freedom. John Punch ran away from his masters in 1640 after having fulfilled his indentured servant contract. When recaptured, the court sentenced him to slavery for life. African servants were treated differently than white servants, even though the institution of slavery wasn’t as pervasive as it would become.

Robert Parker took Casor off of Johnson’s property to his own farm under the pretense that he was free. Johnson sued Parker, saying that Casor was his for life. The court ruled in Johnson’s favor and pronounced Casor an enslaved person for life.

Brown’s short poem begins with the words, “We’d like a list of what we lost” (34), referring to all Africans brought across the middle passage. He describes the wound of African America as the fact “That somebody bought them, That somebody brought them” (34).