Come feel the omnipresent spirit of African Ancestors in Charleston.
When I planned my weekend getaway to Charleston, I fully intended on basking in all the southern-ness I’d been yearning for while living in Boston. I’d chat with gracious southerners with incomparable etiquette. I’d dine on delectable southern cuisine. Most of all, I intended on giving my ears a break from the harshness of the Bostonian accent to capture the sweetest of twang. Charleston is, after all, the crown jewel of the south. Its timeless allure is immortalized in American folklore and literature. It is where you go when you need a super does of southern charm. Although I went to Charleston for its southern-ness, I never expected that I’d be surrounded by its African-ness as well. All-the-while the city is touted as the epicenter of quintessential southern gentry, I’ve rarely heard it positioned as a starting point of Africans in American. Yet, when I visited, I was constantly surrounded by the works and stories that drew a bridge to my own past.
This history and culture of Charleston is the history of the African majority who built and developed the city from the colonial era onward. It is impossible to separate the history of Charleston from the history of the Africans that populated the city for over 300 years. You don’t have to go looking for the history of Black Americans in South Carolina — it hits you right in the face. The African people of Charleston are not an aside to the city, or a footnote. Charleston was not influenced by Africans, but built by Africans in every way. They were and still are the heart of the city.
My first stop of the weekend was Fort Sumter. Etched into memory from history class, it’s always been on my list of places to see. Being the hyper planner that I am, I arrived as their first customer of the morning. I purchased my ticket for the ferry across the bay but it didn’t leave until another two hours at 11. That gave me time to check out the Old Slave Mart Museum.
While touring the Old Slave Mart, or Ryan’s Mart as it was called in the days of slavery, I learned an estimated 80 percent of African Americans today had at least one ancestor who was kidnapped from the Senegambia region then quarantined at Sullivan Island, often for over a month, before being brought into the city. While I can’t know for sure, it is reasonable to believe, that I have some ancestor, from some branch of the family tree that came through this seaport. Considering that probability, the city became more personalized. This wasn’t just a trendy southern city. I was no longer just a history tourist on the outside looking in at a foreign history. This city provides clues to my family’s potential first steps in America.
Initially, Charleston didn’t have a designated spot for the sale of Africans. It was customary for Europeans to buy and sell African people randomly on sidewalks all over town. These spontaneous sales drew inconvenient crowds for pedestrians and carts trying to make their way around town. Ryan’s Mart was built in 1856 to alleviate the sidewalk congestion. Now, Charleston had undergone series of legislation banning the public sale of humans in 1839 as a way of being discrete. That law was overturned a decade later by anti-abolitionists as a way of doubling down on their shamelessness of the institution.
Looking at the cobble stone roads, I wondered if any of my family members, or people who knew my family were creepily inspected on the side of the roads to be bought and sold like a used futon prior to the mart’s construction. Or perhaps someone who cross paths with my ancestors survived time spent in the barracoon of the slave mart. Could all the trauma and heartbreak contained in this concrete cell be part of my family’s initial experience in this country? Through these walls, mamas, most certainly clinging to their little girls knowing the fate of adolescent girls being considered the property of ruthless men. Young sweethearts, crazy in love, waited for the impeding separation, never to see each other again. Mothers never knew what became of their toddlers and children never knew if they had other brothers and sisters out there.
According to displays in the museum, Ryan’s Mart was advertised in newspapers across the south. Even enslavers in Mobile, AL would know when an auction was scheduled and pay a dealer to purchase and deliver people who were enslaved. Those people would be marched in shackles from Charleston to Mobile while the white deliverer would ride alongside of them. If you could imagine…that’s a 9-hour drive on the highway today but walking back then would take weeks. This job illustrates that even individuals that might not have “owned” African people as property, their livelihood still depended on the propagation of the slave industry. Being in the Old Slave Mart connected dots on possible stories of my family’s history. My family has lived an hour’s drive north of Mobile since the end of the Civil War. While Mobile Bay was a significant slave port, most of those enslaved African people had been brought over after being “seasoned” for slave life in the Caribbean. I pondered if my people were part of that crew or the Charleston set? Or both?
After an hour and a half, the museum stimulated my curiosity and provided more data to use for research. I dashed back to my rental parked in two-hour parking right outside the museum then headed back to Fort Sumter National Monument.
The National Parks Department curated a small but impactful museum in the ferry waiting area that doesn’t gloss over some of the less touted realities of antebellum life that history books often omit. Founded in 1663, Charleston became predominantly black by the first decade of the 1700s. By 1770, the Charleston harbor was the nation’s fourth largest port after Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. At the end of the century, Charleston distinguished itself as the wealthiest city in British North America (including the Caribbean). All of its wealth was made possible by its slave industry. Of America’s major cities, Charleston was the only one with a history of having the majority of its residents enslaved. In fact, the majority of all South Carolina residents were enslaved. The irony… South Carolina, a state in America — the bastion of freedom, enslaved most of its residents. The city stayed predominately African until the great migration during the industrial revolution of the early 20th century.
Once out on the island fort, the park ranger gave a spill on the history of Ft Sumter. He was a high energy, charismatic, retired Marine Colonel who implored the visitors to use our imaginations to put ourselves in the shoes of the people of Charleston at the start of the Civil War. Empathy, he contended, was vital to the study of history and human understanding. Just like current events of today, that time period had so many perspectives to consider. With that in mind, I considered what I’d be thinking if I was a young, enlisted soldier doing my daily duties while gearing up for the impending battle. I measured my priorities if I was the commander of the fort, knowing supplies were low and the confederates were getting hostile. I imagined being one of the aristocrats watching the battle from the porch of my ocean-side home. But what I pondered most was the perspective I’d have if I were one of the enslaved people who laid the bricks to build the fortress. I wondered if the hands of one of my ancestors built the bricks that now surrounded me. I ran my hands across as many as I could just in case.
The prevailing viewpoint is the realization that all the grandeur of the city of Charleston depended on the wealth made possible by forced, African labor. With the federal government placing bans on the peculiar institution, the source of income of southerners would be gone (…with the wind). That meant no more fashionable gowns imported from Europe. No more life of leisure, porch sitting. Cultural developments such as America’s first theater building, Dock Street Theater (1736), was made possible by the wealth of the slave economy. The city’s first libraries came from slave money. Every nicety enjoyed by the Charleston elite life came from the work of the kidnapped and enslaved African majority. So it’s understandable that people, reluctant to change, would hold on to the last of their livelihood as long as possible. It’s not unlike folks of today holding on to fleeting or dangerous economies (Coal. Guns. etc).
Two and half hours later I was back in the city and starving. At the recommendation of a friend, a South Carolina native, I ate my fill of mac & cheese and dirty grits (In Charleston they called the dish shrimp ‘n grits…but once you add the sausage and gravy…they qualify as dirty grits) at Poogin’s Porch. The two sites I’d just visited framed my point of reference and my approach to absorbing historical Charleston. The cityscape captured my imagination of what used to be. Roaming the streets, I envisioned some distant relative once traveled the same path as me. I reckoned they probably looked at the same exchange building or churches I passed. Gadsden Wharf was the busiest port for the nation’s slave trade capitol. But on this day, I watched an energetic fitness influencer pose for a photoshoot.
As I wandered the streets, words from Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography came to mind, “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets,” he wrote. The beautiful, ornamental wrought iron work featured prominently around the city were designed and created by talented African blacksmiths. The sweet grass baskets that Charleston is famous for (and charges a small fortune), are the handicrafts of West Africa. The bricks that line the streets, make up the stately antebellum homes, and hold up Fort Sumter were all made by enslaved Africans. The food culture of Charleston was made famous by African cooks, chefs, and caterers like Nat Fuller and Sally Seymour. The beautiful gowns seen painted in portraits likely designed and stitched by African seamstresses, made out of African cultivated cotton, and all financed through African labor. Any building, church, home, artifact of the period in the town, was either created by the wealth of enslaved African labor or physically built by the Africans themselves. Even modern buildings were likely built from local revenue which continues to profit off of the antebellum history tourism (i.e. plantation weddings and tours). Equiano’s words were omnipresent as I wandered the painstakingly preserved French quarter streets. This nation too, was full of talented African artisans and craftsmen. Every street I turned down I was surrounded by the works of my ancestors.
The last stop of my Saturday was the ancestral plantations of the Drayton family at Magnolia Plantation. Just six years ago, the plantation started to acknowledge the overlooked narrative of all the people who lived on this plantation. It offers a “From Slavery to Freedom” tour. I was suspicious of the how the plantation would approach this narrative when I bought my ticket. But my suspicions were alleviated by the tactful docent who led the tour with the dignity and respect the stories deserved. The original slave shacks remaining on the plantation tell the stories of five different time periods. The descendants of enslaved people lived in these cabins and took care of the grounds until the late 1990s when the last passed away. I had been under the impression enslavers didn’t document where the people that they enslaved came from. But they did. In fact, in Charleston, they were very particular about where they seized people. Africans from the Senegambia region were specifically targeted for their rice cultivation skills. Before cotton became king in the south, rice was the cash crop of coastal South Carolina. Charleston enslavers had been primarily familiar with rice farmers until they took hold of Angolan warriors. The warriors were transported over, said, “Oh hell nah,” then killed everybody at Stono Rebellion (also called Cato’s Conspiracy) just a little way outside of Charleston. At the time, 40 percent of Africans in Charleston were kidnapped from the region now recognized as Angola. After the revolt, a decade-long hiatus in abductions from Angola, among other preventative measures, took effect.
The Year 2019 marks the 400th year that the ship, White Lion, docked in Virginia carrying the first people who were enslaved in America. Ghana has declared 2019 as “The Year of Return” and invites all people of African descent to visit the West African nation. If visiting your ancestral lands in Africa isn’t an option, Charleston makes a more accessible option. Even if your ancestors didn’t arrive in America this way, Charleston is steeped in the details that you can’t learn from textbooks and still worth the visit. Even after majoring in history, this weekend tourist trip to Charleston willed in so many gaps in the lessons I learned in school. If you’re looking for something more international, but closer than Africa, The Bahamas, Barbados, St. Kitts, Haiti, and Jamaica are other, closer options for a Black History Month getaway with deeply rooted African history that connects the stories of America’s African history as well.