The Amistad Rebellion (35 page)

Especially striking, upon their arrival, was the Africans’ change in attitude to the Western clothing they wore. According to Raymond
and Steele, “Some of them indicate a strong desire to lay aside their clothing and return to their former savage life of nakedness.” As they stripped off the most outwardly visible aspects of their newly acquired “civilization,” the missionaries saw a regression to heathenism and “licentiousness.” They solemnly denounced it at the time and in their correspondence to abolitionists in America after their arrival. The desire of the Africans to revert to “country fashion” was a continual source of friction.
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The shedding of clothes was not simply a repudiation of the hard work the abolitionists had done in the New Haven jail to educate the Africans and to make them Christians. It laid bare the cultural conflict that had been there all along, which the abolitionists now began, for the first time, to understand. Snatched from Africa without a trace and now returning to Freetown, home to more than fifty displaced African nations and ethnicities, the
Amistad
Africans had to show everyone who they were. The easiest and most convincing way to do this was to show one’s “country marks,” the ritual scarifications by which the peoples of Freetown recognized and understood, cooperated and fought with, each other. Raymond and Steele saw that the Africans were eager to show “the
gree-gree
marks as they call them, which are found upon their bodies.” The missionaries even came to see that these marks had deep cultural significance: “These are marks of honor, diplomas which have great meaning with them.” Because the Africans kept the secrets of the Poro Society while they were in America, no one had understood that they received these marks “when they pass through certain branches of learning, or acquit themselves of feats of agility or danger, and are then entitled to change their names or adopt an addition to them, and not before.” The cicatrices variously signified the young man’s initiation, the warrior’s conquest of fear and mastery of acrobatic maneuver, and the man’s quest for ultimate spiritual knowledge. These people were Africans, and indeed they had acted as such throughout their ordeal—no matter that the white men could not understand them. Now they were Africans
back in Africa
. The configuration of historical forces had once again been changed by an oceanic voyage.
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This set of truths, and the geopolitical situation in which they emerged, shocked the missionaries. They were taken aback not only by their own “brethren,” but by the Mende people they encountered in Freetown. They considered them “warlike” and “troublesome,” noting that some had been involved in the slave trade. Indeed a large group of them had recently caused a whole new set of problems for the Sierra Leone colony when they armed themselves, moved into a region of Temne territory called “Aquia,” and squatted on the fertile, unoccupied land to grow rice. They fought the Temne and they also fought each other.
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During the first few months in Sierra Leone, as the missionaries searched for land on which to build the mission, about two-thirds of the
Amistad
Africans deserted the project, a sure sign that the parties’ ideas about the future had diverged. Some found work as wage laborers in Freetown or other towns nearby. Several of the men worked with Cinqué on a trading expedition by canoe to Bullom country, while several others labored, together, in a nearby town called Waterloo. In new material circumstances the “Mendi People” transformed themselves into work teams. Yet probably a majority of the
Amistad
Africans managed, in one way or another, to get home to the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, wives and children for whom they had longed. There is no way to be sure, for after leaving the mission most of them disappear from the historical record.
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For a few, there was no going home again. This was especially true for the children, who simply could not fend for themselves in an insecure world of warfare and continuing enslavement. Kagne, Teme, Margru, and Kale all stayed with the missionaries. They and several of the men signaled the seriousness of their cultural transformation by taking English/American names: Kagne became Charlotte; Teme, Maria; Margru, Sarah Kinson; and Kale, George Lewis. Steele wrote, “Those who remain are the very best of the company (except Cinque) and they had at their own request assumed English names, and thoroughly adopted civilized habits.” Yet even several of those who stayed, oscillated into and out of the mission over time. Ba, who took the name David Brown, stayed at the mission for more than two years,
although some of the time he lived apart, much to the disapproval of William Raymond, who eventually excommunicated him for living “in adultery” and for having “taken some of the articles belonging to the mission and put them into the hands of his paramour.” Raymond had “required him to leave the woman or to leave me, and he chose the latter.” He was, the missionary solemnly intoned, “no longer one of my people.” The men who stayed basically became wage laborers at the mission, performing a variety of tasks in the crafts, agriculture, or manufacturing. They were “hard to manage” and they had fitful relationships to Christianity. Raymond himself believed that only Margru was a “true Christian.”
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In April 1842, Fuli wrote to Lewis Tappan that he, Cinqué, Burna, and James Covey had gone to Bullom country to look for land for the mission, and added that “all the rest gone away to Mendi to see their parents.” He thought many of them “will come again,” but he was not certain, and he assured Tappan that God would punish them if they did not. Most apparently did not return, for within four months, by April 1842, the number of the “Mendi People” at the mission had dropped to ten men and the three little girls. The number remained the same twenty months later, after the mission had moved in 1843 to Kaw Mende, about halfway between Freetown and Monrovia. A few, like Kinna and Cinqué, came and went according to the vicissitudes of their lives, coming when they had fallen on hard times and needed assistance, going when familial or working commitments called.
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In the end, perhaps the single most important thing those free people called the
Amistad
Africans did upon returning to Sierra Leone was to strengthen the struggle against slavery, the pervasiveness of which was obvious to one and all. The missionaries and the Africans not only saw hundreds of slaves, some domestic, some meant for Atlantic markets, they also encountered people such as Thomas Caulker of the infamous mulatto slave-trading family that had originally “sold two of our company” into slavery, noted Steele. To make matters worse, some of the
Amistad
Africans got caught up in the wars that surrounded the slave trade. Three of them were caught in Fuli’s hometown, Mperri, when it was attacked by the army of King Kissicummah. Fuli and
Tsukama escaped, but Sa was killed. James Covey was likewise killed in war a short time later. His Mende name, Kaweli, which meant “war road”—that is, the path opened by war to the coast for the transit of slaves—predicted his own tragic end.
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Homecoming

The human meaning of the return was perhaps most poignantly expressed when Burna encountered his mother after a long and mysterious absence of more than three years. Leaving early to catch the flood tide, Burna and James Steele arrived by canoe at the woman’s small home of wattle and thatch while she was gathering wood in the bush. The men took a seat in the shade of orange trees to await her return. They soon heard a deep sigh and then a crash as the large bundle of wood the woman had carried upon her head fell to the ground. They caught sight of her as she came around the house, walking toward them slowly, with her hands raised to the level of her face, her “open palms presented.” Tears streamed down her “furrowed face” and soon she began to moan “most piteously.” The look on her face suggested that she had “seen one returned from the land of spirits.” The son she had long thought dead now “sat in full view before her.”
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She did not approach him directly. She walked around him, to the side from which she had first come, “continually weeping and moaning” and uttering exclamations in Gbandi. Burna himself did not move, but rather sat “like one petrified with the intensity of his feelings.” He placed his elbow on his knee, his head in his hand, and he too began to weep.

Eventually his mother came to stand directly in front of him, whereupon her “maternal feelings” rushed upon her “at once like a torrent.” She threw herself at his feet in the sand and embraced one of them, rolling from side to side, “still uttering her mournful cries,” in seeming “perfect agony.” The intensity of the moment was so great the missionary had to turn his face away. He wrote, “I had never before seen such an expression of nature’s own feelings, unrestrained by art or refinement.” After a considerable time, the mother began to sing the
seno
, a song of welcome, as she and her long-lost son joyously rubbed the palms of their right hands in the traditional way. The cold, ruthless hand of slavery had been replaced by the tender warmth of the mother’s palm. Burna, known for his strong feeling for his shipmates, probably thought of Foone, who on the other side of the Atlantic had so dearly longed to see his own mother.
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D
uring the fall of 1841, Madison Washington, a self-emancipated former slave from Virginia, knocked on the door of Robert Purvis in Philadelphia as he was on his way back south to assist his wife’s escape from bondage. Washington had certainly come to the right place. Purvis had been active for several years in the Vigilance Committee and the Underground Railroad. He remembered, years later, “I was at that time in charge of the work of assisting fugitive slaves to escape.” Purvis already knew Washington because he had helped him gain his freedom by getting to Canada two years earlier. Washington had since “opened correspondence with a young white man in the South,” who had promised to ferry his wife away from her plantation and to bring her to an appointed place so that the two of them could then escape northward. Purvis did not like the plan. He had witnessed others undertake such dangerous labors of love and fail. He was sure that his visitor would be captured and reenslaved. Washington, however, was determined to carry on.
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By coincidence Washington arrived at the abolitionist’s home on the very same day a painting was delivered: Nathaniel Jocelyn’s portrait, “Sinque, the Hero of the Amistad,” as Purvis called it. It so happened that Cinqué and twenty-one other
Amistad
Africans had also been in Purvis’s large, majestic home on the northwest corner of Sixteenth and Mount Vernon streets, when they visited Philadelphia on their fundraising
tour of May 1841. (Cinqué later sent a message, “
Tell Mr. Purvis to send me my hat.
”) Purvis had long been inspired by the
Amistad
struggle and in late 1840–early 1841, as the Supreme Court prepared to rule on the case, he commissioned Jocelyn to paint the portrait.
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Washington took a keen interest in the painting and the story behind it. When Purvis told him about Cinqué and his comrades, Washington “drank in every word and greatly admired the hero’s courage and intelligence.” Washington soon departed, headed southward in search of his wife, but he never returned, as he had hoped to do in retracing his steps toward Canada. Someone betrayed him, as Purvis had predicted (and only learned some years later). Washington was “captured while escaping with his wife.” He was clapped into chains again and placed on board a domestic slave ship called the
Creole
, bound from Virginia to New Orleans in November 1841.
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As the
Creole
set sail, Washington remembered Cinqué’s story—the courage and the intelligence, the plan and the victory. Working as a cook aboard the vessel, which allowed him easy communication with his shipmates, Washington began to organize. With eighteen others he rose up, killed a slave-trading agent, wounded the captain severely, seized control of the ship, and liberated a hundred and thirty fellow Africans and African Americans. Wary of trickery, Washington forced the mate to navigate the vessel to Nassau in the Bahama Islands, where the British had abolished slavery three years earlier. In Nassau harbor they met black boatmen and soldiers, who sympathized with the emancipation from below and took charge of the
Creole
, supporting the rebels and insuring their victory.
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Representatives of the federal government literally screamed bloody murder, just as those of Spain had done two years earlier, following the rebellion aboard the
Amistad
. They demanded the return of the slaves, who must, they insisted, be tried in the United States for rising up to kill their oppressors. U.S. officials self-righteously defended the institution of slavery and called for all property to be restored to its rightful owners. The British government, however, refused to comply with the order. Madison Washington and many of his comrades gained their
freedom, boarded vessels bound hither and yon around the Atlantic, and left no further traces in the historical record.
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