ABSTRACT
I imagine my first African ancestor’s half-blind gaze as he leaves the slave ship in Charleston, South Carolina. Now, arriving on land, having spent three months in the hold of a ship bearing a name such as Diligence. Not unlike the purposefulness of the sacred name of a god—Mercurio, which in 1823 took ancestors from West Africa, transporting them to Southeast Brazil. Not unlike the Madre de Deus or The Good Ship Jesus—the first British slave ship to arrive in America in 1562. These holy names are painted on the ship’s bow. The ships have been sent off with the blessings of European monarchies and the Roman papacy, to capture human lives that exist to them only as inhuman African cargo. This is the Middle Passage, a phase of the African Holocaust of which my first ancestor was an unwilling and persecuted victim. The ships holding him, and other captive African men, arrive on the stolen waterways of soon to be enslaved and genocide native indigenous people.
The Indians were the first occupants of the area surrounding Winyah Bay; the Spaniards probed the region at times; the English finally dominated. The Indians who inhabited what is now South Carolina belonged, according to the ethnologists, to three linguistic stocks: the Iroquoian, the Muskhogean, and the Eastern Siouan.
(The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, George Rogers, 1985, p.9)