Triangular Road: A Memoir (5 page)

I had never, for example, come across so much as a word in any of those pages about the “scrambles” held along the tidal James.

At long last making up for having been educationally shortchanged!

One evening, digging in the stacks, I unearthed the despised Edict of 1808:

 

 

The furor this caused. The trade to be halted when there was still so much work to be done! Work that needed “the strength and the sinews of the African world!” as one English wag at the time put it. And with so much money still to be
made buying and selling chattel labor! Where there’s a will, there’s, inevitably, the proverbial way, so that the 1808 Edict notwithstanding, a way was quickly found to maintain the supply and to add to it even. The Tidewater big houses: the Shirley Plantation, the Sherwood Forest Plantation, the Flowerdew Hundred Plantation, Monticello, Mount Vernon, the Swan’s Point Plantation et al. began the purposeful breeding and sale of homegrown chattel. The enterprise proved so successful that, by the mid-1800s, there was a surplus of a quarter million chattel labor and more. This posed yet another problem. Again, it was easily solved. The surplus was simply, periodically, herded by cart into Richmond Towne, where it was quickly sold in the Bottom; then, as quickly, packed into the cattle cars of the CSX Railroad and into the holds of the ships at the Manchester Docks to be railroaded and shipped due south, deep south: New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta.

The river and the railroad provided the final solution.

 

 

 

B
y now the runaway part of my mind has reached the end of the James River. The sixty-mile run down from Richmond is over, and I’ve finally reached historic Jamestown as well as Point Comfort, the name given to the actual landing site of that first band of English settlers in 1607. A dozen years later, Point Comfort would also, ironically,
be the place where the first “scrambles” of a sort took place. The captain of a Dutch three-master, a consignment of “twenty-and-odd negroes” (lowercase “n”) in the hold of his ship, put them up for sale at Point Comfort. The exact provenance of the group was uncertain. It’s unlikely that they were directly from “the kingdoms of Africa”—since, at the time, the trade in chattel cargo was routed mainly from West Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean archipelago. In all likelihood the “twenty-and-odd” were probably transshipments from a Caribbean island or former property of some bankrupt West Indian planter that had been peddled up the archipelago until the Dutch ship finally reached the Atlantic shoreline and Jamestown. In any event, they were immediately put up for sale at Point Comfort. No money as such changed hands. The Dutch ship being low on provisions, the chattel were exchanged for so many sacks of corn, beans and oats, so many barrels of smoked and salted meat. The exchange concluded, the “twenty-and-odd” were quickly led off to the monumental work awaiting them as well as the eight million like them who would follow over the centuries.

“
L
aborDay.”

Startled, my friend Virginia looks over at me. I’ve broken our silence again. A few minutes earlier, we had been discussing where to have a leisurely holiday lunch in downtown Richmond. Once that was decided, we had fallen silent, each of us privately taking leave of the river and the last of the morning.

“Seems to me this particular holiday needs to be more inclusive in whom it acknowledges.”

“Paule . . . ?”

“All those centuries of hard back, donkeywork done gratis. When I think of that . . .”

Troubled by my tone, my friend sits around to face me fully on our stone ottoman. Virginia’s face. To all appearances, it is a white woman’s face. In my friend’s complex genealogy, white has seemingly overwhelmed all the black in her DNA. On her maternal family tree, there had been a German grandmother, a cook in a well-to-do, late-nineteenth-century New York household, who fell in love with the family’s black coachman recently up from Amelia County, Virginia. Her paternal line reaches even farther back to the son of one of
the antebellum’s wealthiest planters. The family still ranks among today’s F.F.V.s, the First Families of Virginia, that is, the true aristocracy. Their long-ago son also figured in the whiteness that dominates my friend’s bloodline. But only physically. Only in appearance.

Certainly not in Virginia’s mind, heart and reading of history. Indeed, occupying a place of honor in her living room is a lovingly preserved, dim little snapshot of an elderly couple seated in front of a shotgun house that is as old and weathered as they are. The man’s long John Henry legs seem to extend beyond the picture’s frame, while his aged wife has clearly passed down, intact, her small, sinewy body to my friend. The couple are a Southern Gothic, and they are both as black as me. They are Virginia’s great-grandparents on her mother’s side, once chattel labor; then sharecroppers, once they were freed.

Virginia had taken the picture with her box camera once when visiting them as a teenager.

The snapshot of the old couple always reminds me of my West Indian grandmother, whose history was not all that different. There was a
small, worn, sepia-brown photograph of her that my mother—a devoted daughter—had brought with her to America. She had kept it for luck, she said, next to her passport in her pocketbook when she landed on Ellis Island over a half century ago.

“By the way,” Virginia says suddenly, “I almost forgot to tell you that while you were away there was talk again, even official talk this time, about maybe putting up a historical marker at the Manchester Docks. . . .”

She waits for my reaction.

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” I say.

“Me neither, I guess,” Virginia adds.

With that, we gather up our empty water bottles and the cushions we had also brought along, and with my intrepid friend once again in the lead, we start the arduous climb up the north bank, leaving behind the huge willow oak of a punkah fan, our stone ottoman and the once-pristine but now shamefully polluted and ill-used river.

I’VE KNOWN SEAS: THE CARIBBEAN SEA

I saw New York rise shining from the sea.

—ADRIANA VIOLA CLEMENT, SEPTEMBER 9, 1923

 

 

I
f it so happened that “the twenty-and-odd negroes” did, in fact, arrive at Jamestown’s Point Comfort by way of the West Indies instead of directly from Africa, then the island of their provenance might well have been Barbados—Barbados being, circa 1600, as important a holding pen and transshipment point as Richmond, Virginia, would become, circa 1820, owing to a
surplus at the time of locally bred chattel. A green little coral gemstone of an island situated in the lower half of the Caribbean archipelago, Barbados is considered part of the conga line of islands doing their winding dance from the Florida Keys to the tip of Venezuela. Actually, Barbados has excused itself from the dance line to sit like a lonely wallflower off to itself some distance out in the Atlantic. It is the easternmost island in the chain, a tiny outpost of 166 square miles that, geographically, is the closest point in the Caribbean to the great pregnant bulge of West Africa and the former barracoon slave pens at Goree, Guinea, Elmina, Whydah, the Bight of Benin et al.

When the trade in chattel cargo began in earnest, diminutive Barbados was invariably the first bit of terra firma sighted on the long, grueling Atlantic run. The island was at once landfall and a safe haven, with a natural harbor along its Caribbean coastline. Thus, it was often the place where the chattel cargo—those that had somehow managed to survive the crossing—were prepared for market, first cleansed of the caked shit, then fed—force-fed if necessary—to put flesh on the
wasted, festering limbs, and the will and spirit further broken. Once this was done—and it could take weeks—the better part of the cargo was then transshipped for sale up and down the hemisphere. Left behind was a portion needed to work the ever-expanding fields of tobacco (“the jovial weed” again) and, later on, the great sugarcane estates that would supplant tobacco to overrun Barbados. Then there were the incorrigibles, those among the consignment who somehow withstood the whipping post and the pillory, their resistance unbroken. Difficult to sell, they, too, were left behind on the little wallflower island.

Barbados, British-owned and colonized from the beginning, was a principal way station at the outset of the trade.

It was also the birthplace of my parents, descendants perhaps of the incorrigibles left behind. (I like to think as much.) My mother, Adriana Viola Clement, grew up in a hilly district called Scotland on the Atlantic or windward coast, while my father, Sam Burke, who totally disowned “the damn little two-by-four island,” never mentioned either his family or the name of his birthplace,
aside from referring to it, when pressed, as “some poor-behind little village buried in a sea of canes, a place forgotten behind God’s back.” Shortly after World War I, along with scores like them from other English-speaking islands in the Caribbean, Adriana Viola Clement and Sam Burke immigrated north to Big America. Although separately. They didn’t know each other as yet.

Adriana Clement was eighteen. A photograph of her when she first arrived in New York revealed a sweet-faced girl with a childish appearance that was at odds with her tall, large-boned, fully fleshed woman’s body. Physically, Adriana took after her father, Prince Albert Clement, a John Henry workhorse of a man who died when she was a child. A master cooper on one of the sugar estates, Prince Albert’s sole weakness had been the rum that went into the huge casks he skillfully fashioned by hand. Adriana, as one of the youngest of his fourteen children, had been pampered growing up. Indeed, she had left Barbados not knowing how to braid her own hair. Her eldest sister, who practically raised her, had always done that for her.

The SS
Nerissa
brought her north, a leaky old tub that, according to Adriana, must have been in existence “ever since Man said, ‘Come, let us make boats.’” It was a slow, turbulent journey up the Caribbean Sea that kept her, she said, “puking and praying,” and clinging to the sepia-brown photograph of her mother.

“All the same, I reach safe, yes. I saw New York rise shining from the sea.”

Whenever Adriana recalled the sight of the city emerging from the Atlantic, she always slowly raised her hands, palms up, like a conductor motioning a symphonic orchestra to its feet.

The soaring wonder of New York City! That first day, amid the throngs from Europe on Ellis Island (“White people like peas! And not one of them speaking the King’s English”: Adriana’s scathing comment); that day she had presented her papers to the authorities, along with the “show money” required of those emigrating from the Caribbean. She would later explain “the show money” to her American-born children: “If you was from the West Indies you had to have fifty big
U.S. dollars to show to the authorities when you landed, to prove you wasn’t a pauper or coming to the country to be a pauper. Back then, if you was black, you cun [couldn’t] set foot in big America without fifty dollars cold cash in you’ hand.”

The “show money,” as well as the much larger sum that had paid her passage north, had come from a single source: Panama Money from an older brother she had never really known. It was money so named after the canal, begun in 1905, that he had helped build. While she was still an infant, her brother, Joseph Fitzroy Clement, the eldest son, had been among the legion of young men from the islands who, hearing of the money to be made on the canal, had eagerly left for the isthmus; there to work from the time God’s sun rose till it set, hacking away at the near-impenetrable jungle, draining the huge pestilential swamps, carving a waterway to link the two great oceans. A hellhole of mud, torrential rains and brutal sun, with temperatures at 120 degrees well before noon. Close to 5,000 would die over the course of the construction. Malaria. Yellow fever. Bubonic plague. The
plague eventually claimed Joseph Fitzroy, but not before he dutifully sent home the better part of his pay during his years there. So, too, did most of the other islanders.