The Middle Passage in Slave Times -and Later

Mid-career I found myself in a new setting. After leaving Pebble Hill Plantation, I served a stint with the South Carolina Historical Society based in Charleston. Historical interest and educational tourism at the time were focusing on Charleston as the epicenter of the African slave trade. Slave censuses and other records of slavery made the Historical Society collection, housed in the old city morgue, a touchstone for many researchers -contributing to a tide of books on plantations, antebellum slavery and the inner life of slave societies. The story of these lives was difficult to research or even quantify, so the South Carolina Historical Society collection was of national importance and attracted many professional historians and graduate students .

Given all its jargon and statistical details, few readers found scholarly work accessible, and as so often happens, art and popular fiction began to convey the meaning of this research to a larger public and to black families and especially their children. Alex Haley’s Roots (and the mega-hit tv series it inspired) was the most popular of the artistic works to remold black perceptions of themselves and express the ethic histories of African people caught up in the forced diaspora of slavery.

Tom Feelings was an artist whose career flourished as he embraced this new history and the celebration of “black is beautiful.” His illustrations in children’s books were winners of major literary prizes and he was appointed to a professorship at the University of South Carolina. Here he published the work that may be his best remembered: the incredible drawings published as The Middle Passage (1996), interpretive illustrations of the transatlantic journey into slavery. By then, I had become director of the Thronateeska Heritage Center in Albany, Georgia.

Albany in the late nineties was divided, as many southern cities had become as, white-owned businesses fled the downtown and moved into a mostly white enclave north and west of town, anchored by the citiy’s shopping center. The downtown existed largely because government offices remained there -the post office, county court house, federal court, city hall. Albany was home to a college (recently revamped as “university” as were all the four-year colleges in the state). Albany State University was founded by the state to serve black students. There was also a junior college. Integration had mostly impacted the public school system, one of the few places within the reach of federal laws aimed at dismantling institutionalized racism.

Albany had recently experienced a billion-dollar flood and would soon experience still a second. The first was covered nationally by the major networks and print media. The second -that arrived shortly after I did- received little attention. The Flint River, far downstream from the Atlanta International Airport, flooded when torrential tropical storms parked over Atlanta for days. Recovery helped pull the community together, as did the very active local chapter of Habitat for Humanity which built infill housing to replace homes devasated in the floods. The was a deep pool of generosity fed by the churches in Albany.

The Thronateeska Historical Society and Museum was situated in the once-proud rail passenger station. As in many towns across the nation, such stations were repurpossed as cultural sites or venues. Before and after the Civil War, Albany was a rail hub. In fact, southwest Georgia was a favorite tourist destination before Florida boomed in the 1920’s with the advent of affordable automobiles; medical knowledge and public health practices had eradicated the worst insect- bourn diseases, malaria and yellow fever which would at at last open sunny Florida to become both playground and a real estate developer’s dream. Albany’s hotels, like those in nearby Thomasville, Cordele and Americus had long since closed. Still, Albany was the financial and medical hub for the economically important farm belt, a region of about forty agricultural counties surrounding Albany that remain among the poorest in the state. There were a few large production facilities that provided some employment opportunities. It was a complicated and contradictory setting.

Finally, Albany has been valuable to the military. World War II British pilots were trained there before America entered the war. And the Air Force base there was used to launch U-2 Spy planes over Cuba (and elsewhere), especially the Cuban Missile Crisis. The pilot captured captured when his U-2 plane was shot down over the Soviet Union was recruited by the CIA at a local hotel. So, there was much history and considerable potential to find a way forward as the 20th century came to an end.

A serious effort involving many of the best educated and most influential men and women of Albany -black and white-to revitalize the downtown was underway when I arrived. This was a remarkable group of people that I would come to know and admire. Several served on my advisory board.

Progress was painfully slow. Downtown retail shopping had collapsed in the “white flight” from the inner city -a phenomenon creating crushing revenue crises for the smaller cities and towns of south Georgia. Recent federal censuses registered little population growth as the state capital, Atlanta, grew at an amazing pace, ingesting most of the financial, medical and commercial air available and dominating the state legislature.

What emerged in Albany was a a plan to revitalize the downtown through tourism. A “River Center” was planned, ISTEA grants would improve accessibility to public areas, renovated and new inner city construction would restore city center as a viable retail setting. For anyone who read the newspapers and watched television news, this was a story that might as well have been written about hundreds -or perhaps thousands- of cities. In south Georgia, cities where blacks were a majority or near majority and whites largely controlled commerce, a sort of uneasy peace reigned. “Stalemate” is an overly-simple but convenient shorthand description of what prevailed.

Like many in Albany, I hoped to discover some way in which to soften antagonisms and encourage authentic progress. I struggled with this. I made friends at the university and taught there as an adjunct. I attended the meetings of the redevelopment group when invited. Out of the blue, a young man showed up at the museum and inspired my next move. To my everlasting embarrassment I can not recall his name. I hope this article will prompt him to contact me. He appears in the picture above on the right.

I hoped the museum would become common ground. The only alternative for the museum’s survival from a practical financial standpoint would be to move the museum (and other cultural institutions) out of the city and into the white enclave. Not a choice I was prepared to champion.

I thought an exhibition or presentation by a prominent black artist or author was a do-able small step worth taking to bridge the divide. Albany supplied some of the important components of the Civil Rights movements, particularly the protest music that has become part of our national fabric. This had given rise to a black museum and cultural center in Albany that was closely linked, socially if not financially, to Albany State University. And, a number of the Reverend Martin Luther King’s inner circle had grown up in the Albany area. The Rev. King had appeared in Albany to personally lead protest efforts. Local law enforcement had damped protest in Albany by exporting arrested demonstrators to be held in the jail cells of neighboring counties and many white Albanians were quick to point out with obvious pride, that this had been a major defeat for King and his movement.

My new friend was an artist to the bone and an amateur historian on a mission. He had created a model of a slave ship. Then he had invited members of the black community to consecrate the model by the “laying on of hands,” depositing their DNA on the ship model by physically touching it. Then he sealed the model in plexiglass, symbolically preserving a memory painful to recall but far too precious to forget -the “middle passage” of slavery. In this exploitive trade, sailing ships carried the kidnapped from the “slave castles” on the coast of Ghana to the Caribbean and on to the shores of the new world. Traded and sold in the coastal markets, these involuntary immigrants were sold to work the fields of plantation owners and to provide the manpower for the roughest enterprises of New Englanders. The slave system would divide the country for centuries; its aftermath of segregation would stain the idealism of the progressive dynamo that America would become.

I would need more of course than a single display case of material. So my (now) anonymous friend suggested I read a recently published book by Tom Feelings entitled The Middle Passage. I knew of Feelings’ work in writing and illustrating children’s books. Middle Passage was an altogether different thing. Its dramatic illustrations arrested my attention. They told a vividly depicted story of violent encounters, callous confinement and dangerous passages, in short the horrors of kidnapping and transporting an unwilling labor force to America, where its victims endured with little hope of freedom or relief.

I wrote Mr. Feelings to see if he might be persuaded to allow us to exhibit his artwork. Would he be willing to participate in an exhibition based upon his book? He was ahead of me. His original drawings, intended for the book, had been framed and were ready for display. Would he come to Albany? Yes. It was the most exciting exhibit I had been able to muster in years and it held possibilities -for change, for community inclusion, for some to reappraise the cost of trying to preserve the “Lost Cause” and other idealized romantic myths about how slavery had not been all that bad. I naively envisioned a new beginning for the community. And, fresh air for the old (segregated) train station that was home to a museum in search of a new mission.

The opening was a great success and well attended -by the black community. Mr. Feeling proved dignified, approachable, insightful, everything I had hoped for. My forgotten friend was there with his family and friends. Dinner followed at the home of one of Albany State’s Art professors. Except for my board of directors, there were few whites in attendance. One museum board member offered an explanation: “white people are not going to come downtown after dark.”

There is more to this story. The exhibit attracted the attention of the Atlanta newspapers and I received a call from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. They had developed a program to prepare long-term prisoners for release. The ironic beauty of this did not escape me -I was overjoyed of course that someone had taken notice of our museum on the outskirts of what sophisticates might consider the civilized world. At a deeper level, the idea that this might serve as a catharsis for the complex emotions that the visiting prisoners might be processing as the prospects of freedom became a reality. That knowledge must have generated both joy and anxiety. They had endured a long journey, long term incarceration for events that were now decades in the past. I lost a lot of sleep pondering how this exhibit might effect them.

A special bus arrived at the appointed time (I wished at the time that Mr. Feelings was there to receive them -he would have appreciated the deeper implications of their arrival and their reaction to what they were about to see). Virtually all of the prisoners were black. That spoke tomes about our social and political structure. I was prepared for that. What I was not prepared for was the reaction of the prisoners. The atmosphere was one of reverential quietness, as these men, most of them more than sixty years of age, made their way from one image to another. The written word would not have afforded the deep emotional access that these drawings did. They commented but little on what they were seeing. They had endured a long passage. They were arriving on a strange shore. A few thanked us for our efforts with choked voices. Many simply wept.