The Logbooks. Anne Farrow
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The Logbooks
A DRIFTLESS CONNECTICUT SERIES BOOK
This book is a 2014 selection in the Driftless Connecticut Series, for an outstanding book in any field on a Connecticut topic or written by a Connecticut author.
ALSO BY ANNE FARROW
Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (2005; with Joel Lang & Jenifer Frank)
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT
ANNE FARROW
The Logbooks
CONNECTICUT’S SLAVE SHIPS AND HUMAN MEMORY
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2014 Anne Farrow
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Eric M. Brooks
Typeset in Monotype Bell by Passumpsic Publishing
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.
The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
5 4 3 2 1
Cover photograph: The jetty at Bence Island, by Thomas Brown/Hartford Courant. For thousands of African people, walking this gravel path was their last moment on African soil.
FOR STEPHEN,
who has a verdant heart
Contents
Another Century, Not My Own 29
History for an Abandoned Place 35
The Story of a Stone 55
The Slaughterhouse 60
[THREE]
TROUBLE IN MIND
A Book with Many Bookmarks 69
A Platform for Memory 73
The Pain That Survives 86
The Fragile Power 91
History That Won’t End 96
[FOUR]
A HISTORY THAT DOESN’T “FIT”
Back to Africa 101
To Live in Peril on the Sea 110
Not a Word but a World 115
The Slave Trade’s Men in Full 117
[FIVE]
SEPARATIONS
A Visit to Madina 131
This Far, and No Further 140
Legacy 144
Lost and Found 146
Our Choice Is the Truth or Nothing 151
Afterword 155
Color photographs follow page 96
Preface
“Why are you doing this?” my friend asked.
I looked at her lean brown face, lit by the glass lamps suspended over our restaurant table, and made what I did not recognize, then, as an excuse.
“New England’s relationship with slavery is a great story,” I said. “We’re journalists; we’re supposed to uncover stories of wrong and injustice.” I made my argument, or, as we called it in the newsroom, my pitch.
Liz looked at me for a long moment with the level, answering gaze I knew from having had her edit my stories at the newspaper.
“That’s not it,” she said. “When white people take up black stuff, there’s always a reason. There’s always something there.”
I told her that I needed engaging work, having recently broken up with my longtime boyfriend. Studying my country’s tortured relationship with slavery and race prejudice made my own life, with its varied