Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
Destrehan did not mention the spiked iron collars, cowhide whips, and face masks that he and the other planters used to encourage the slaves’ “natural habits.” Though the planters had no difficulty reconciling the wealth they enjoyed and the price the slaves paid, the region’s black laborers did. By aborting their own children, poisoning livestock, lighting fires, and escaping to the cypress swamps, the slaves struggled to dilute, deflect, and if possible demolish slaveholders’ authority. Even open revolt was not beyond question. While it was a card that slaves played only rarely—planters tended to take a dim and deadly view of armed rebellion—the German Coast teemed with violent possibilities. The planters’ world rested on a powder keg ready to be ignited by the smallest of sparks. Unbeknownst to those who crowded the ballrooms and attended the season’s festivities, that spark had already been lit.
A
frican and African-descended slaves, Native Americans, free colored people, white women in flaring yellow-and-scarlet gowns, men with caps and hats, plump Americans from the East Coast, and skinny Spanish settlers jostled between the twin rows of the market that extended along the New Orleans levee. While a few ambitious salesmen had erected tables with canvas awnings, most clustered on the ground laying their wares on pieces of canvas or palmetto leaves. Everything one could imagine was on sale—from wild ducks to bananas, oranges and sugar cane to trinkets, tinware, dry goods, and books. The hollers of the salesmen, the shouts of the sailors, and the constant chatter of barter and exchange filled the air with noise—there could not have been fewer than 500 people crowded along the riverbank. And as on every Sunday, there were more black faces than white. Under French custom, many slaves in Louisiana were allowed to raise vegetables and poultry, the surplus of which many exchanged in the region’s markets for clothes, money, and basic necessities of life. They also came to mingle, socialize, and dance.
The Place d’Armes, the wide central square of New Orleans, opened past the markets. To the left, the towers of the Cathedral of St. Louis surged skyward; to the right, a hotel with narrow galleries along the first and second stories shaded the passersby.
As the planters celebrated Epiphany, five or six hundred African men and women from New Orleans and its environs gathered in the Common. Some of their faces bore the ritual facial scars and filed teeth of the Kongo, others the tattoos of the Asante kingdom, while others born in Louisiana or the Caribbean simply bore the scars and calluses of a life spent harvesting sugar. Here in a public square not far from the center of the city, these men and women were able to temporarily forget the harsh conditions of their Louisiana lives.
The participants formed dancing circles around one central ring, where two women danced languorously, holding handkerchiefs with the tips of their fingers. An old man sat on top of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, beating the canvas quickly with the edge of his hand. Several others held drums between their knees, producing incredible explosions of percussive sound. A grizzled man of not less than eighty years of age played an African stringed instrument that extended from the ground to over his head. Women sang African folk songs while walking rhythmically around the drummers. The sounds of Africa rocked the Crescent City.
The square burst with color. The men came wrapped in traditional coastal African garb, brightly dyed robes wrapped around their otherwise naked bodies. The women boasted the latest fashions, sporting clothes made of silk, gauze, muslin, and percale. The flags of different African tribes, regions, and ethnicities flew above the celebrants.
On this day, the day of the anointment of the planters’ Carnival king, this festival would also celebrate the crowning of a new leader. Many times these leaders had been chiefs or kings in Africa. The crowning of the leader was the climax of the festival. The crown looked like a series of brightly colored paper boxes, tapering upward like a pyramid, with two tassels hanging downward from the pinnacle. Ensconced on his throne and crowned with this strange headgear, the king would take ceremonial command. “He wags his head and makes grimaces,” one visitor to New Orleans wrote. “He produces an irresistible effect upon the multitude.”
These dances were probably the largest African gatherings for hundreds of miles; because of its French and Spanish past, New Orleans still allowed large groups of black people to meet—unlike most of the rest of the United States, where such gatherings were banned for fear of the discontent that might surface. These celebrations, religious and profane, were a long tradition in New Orleans, dating from at least the 1770s. These meetings served as a means of exchange, both cultural and economic. But they also served another role, as a breeding ground for slave conspiracies. And that Sunday, the circuits of secret slave communication buzzed with signals: a plot was afoot.
* * *
Two men, Kook and Quamana, were in large part responsible for activating these African channels with revolutionary activity. Like the participants in the dance that January Sunday, Kook and Quamana were Africans. Their names suggest that these two men were Akan, children of a warlike African empire in the height of its glory. Their names were anglicizations of the names Kwaku and Kwamina in the Akan dialects of Twi and Fanti. The name Kook was the name associated with the spider—the classic trickster Kwaku Anansi of Akan folklore—and meant that Kook was born on a Wednesday. The name Quamana was assigned to men born on Tuesdays and was associated with the ocean.
They brought with them from Africa the memories and stories of the powerful and warlike empire in which they most likely grew up. The Asante kingdom controlled large swaths of land around the Bight of Benin stretching across present-day Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana, a distance of about 300 miles. The Asante kingdom was a military union made up of a diverse range of local tribes. Many Akan slaves brought to America had been
okofokums,
common soldiers trained to fight in the massive armies of the West African continent. If Kook and Quamana were indeed Akan, they would have at the very least known how to use a weapon and how to fight—these were things Akans learned from birth.
According to their master’s estimates, Kook and Quamana were born around 1790—a time when war was ravaging the African continent. In the Lower Guinea region, the Oyo empire, the kingdom of Dahomey (known for having palaces decorated with human skulls), and the smaller states of the coast fought for regional supremacy, enslaving and selling prisoners of war to European traders at coastal forts. In the kingdom of the Kongo, a series of civil wars that had begun in 1665 mobilized large numbers of troops, with guns and horses, who fought across the African plains. The violence peaked around 1781, when 30,000 Kongolese warriors stormed the fort at São Salvador under the command of King José I. In the Gold Coast, the Akan were driving toward the coast with massive armies, threatening the European vassal states that supported the Atlantic slave trade. Kook and Quamana were born, grew up, and were sold into slavery amid these international conflicts, children of war fueled by a fast-growing Atlantic economy.
Kook and Quamana arrived in port in 1806 as part of a vast wave of forced migration. That year, ten separate slave ships arrived in the port of New Orleans, bringing a total of between 1,000 and 1,500 slaves to the slave marts of Louisiana. Most of these slaves arrived on board the brig
Carolina
or the schooner
United States,
both of which made multiple trips to and from Charleston, South Carolina. From about 1770 to the legal closing of the slave trade in 1808, slave traders brought an estimated 24,000 to 29,000 slaves to New Orleans, with roughly half of those slaves arriving in Louisiana after the United States took control in 1803. These immigrants were almost all Africans during the Spanish period, and three-quarters African during the American period. During the American period, about 40 percent of slaves came from West Central Africa, 20 percent from Senegambia, and the remainder from the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, the Bight of Benin, and the Windward Coast. The Asante people primarily came from the Bight of Benin.
On its way to New Orleans, Kook and Quamana’s slave ship most likely stopped in Charleston, South Carolina. Like Jamaica and Havana, Charleston functioned as a way station in the slave trade. Some slaves might have stayed for a year or two in these entrepots to be broken in; others might have stayed for a few weeks in a slave market, while still others might never even have gotten off the boat and just waited as their ship resupplied. The Christian slave traders and planters baptized roughly a third to a half of the slaves who arrived in New Orleans during the period in which Kook and Quamana arrived, implying that roughly this portion came direct from Africa, while the rest had been seasoned and baptized elsewhere.
To the ship captains, the bodies packed in the hold were just another type of cargo, but down in the deep darkness below the decks were people with powerful memories of their homeland, and more often than many planters might hope, experience in warfare. To survive this journey, from imprisonment and sale in Africa to baptism in the great Cathedral of New Orleans, required a strong constitution and an ability to witness and endure ferocious and traumatic violence. Death was endemic to the system of enslavement. Forty percent of those captured died even before boarding a slave ship. Another 10 percent died either on the Middle Passage or shortly after arrival in the New World. Only 30 percent of slaves captured in Africa would survive past the third or fourth year of labor.
Kook and Quamana were among the survivors. But beyond these details and statistics, what were their lives really like? What impact did that experience of exodus and diaspora have in shaping these men into the people they became? The stories of most who made these journeys will forever go untold; some few broke the silence, and their voices—and their histories—provide a window into Kook’s and Quamana’s experiences.
Perhaps the best lens into the routes to slavery is a book published by a man named Olaudah Equiano in 1789. Equiano claimed to have been born in Nigeria and brought over from Africa in a slave ship, though records suggest he was actually born in South Carolina. While Equiano’s story may not have been his own, the story nevertheless offers us a glimpse at how a slave experienced, imagined, or heard about the Middle Passage and the transition from Africa to America—a journey better described by a former slave than any white slave trader or abolitionist.
* * *
By his telling, Equiano was born deep in the interior of Africa in the fertile Essaka valley. Growing up in the wooded plains, Equiano had never heard of white men, or Europeans, or of the sea; he knew of the king of Benin, but even that authority was more legendary than concrete. The chiefs and elders of the village were the true authorities. These elders bore the embrenche, a ritual scar made by cutting the skin across at the top of the forehead down to the eyebrows, creating a ridged welt that signified high distinction. Equiano too would receive such a mark when he came of age. Eating goats and poultry, plantains, yams, beans, and corn, the villagers resided in thatch-roofed family dwellings separated by moats or fences. Each building was covered on the inside with a composition of cow dung to keep out the tropical insects. Equiano and his family slept on elevated beds covered with animal skins.
“We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets,” Equiano recalled. Every marriage, birth, victory in war, and other public event would be celebrated with public dances. As betrothed virgins played instruments resembling the guitar and the xylophone, four divisions would dance apart or in succession: the married men came first with ritual warfare, while the married women, young men, and maidens followed with scenes of real life or myth. Men and women both wore long pieces of dyed-blue calico wrapped loosely around the body, while the women of distinction wore golden jewelry as well.
But all was not calm and peaceful in Essaka, as constant wars rippled through the territory. Every man, woman, and child quickly learned to use a variety of weapons. The village was stockpiled with guns, bows and arrows, swords, javelins, and tall shields. “Our whole district is a kind of militia,” Equiano wrote. Entering war, the militia would carry a red flag or banner. The winners would enslave or kill the losers. Often the women were kept as slaves to the Africans, while the more troublesome men were sold away in lieu of being put to death. War was so constant that Equiano remembers every man and woman going out into the fields armed lest the enemy surprise them amid their plantings and harvestings.
When the adults went out into the fields to farm, the children banded together to play games. The village of Essaka was not a safe place for children, however, and one child would be appointed to watch from the treetops for assailants, kidnappers, or enemy tribesmen who might take advantage of the adults’ absence to carry off as many children as they could seize. Some of Equiano’s earliest childhood memories were of kidnappers sneaking into the village to bind and make off with his playmates; it would not be long until this was his fate, too.
One day, while the adults were out in the fields, two men and a woman scaled the walls of the village and captured Equiano and his younger sister. Gagging the two children, the kidnappers rushed them as quickly as possible out of the village. Overpowered, Equiano had no chance to escape. The raiders marched him and his sister far into the woods, stopping only briefly to sleep in a small cabin in the woods. After another day’s travel, they came out onto a road, and Equiano began to scream in the hopes of being rescued. But his kidnappers were rough men and quickly gagged him before tossing him into a sack. He and his sister refused food: “the only comfort we had was in being in one another’s arms all that night, and bathing each other with our tears.” That comfort too would be denied him, as the kidnappers sold off his sister the next day.
After a long journey, Equiano came to the river; he had never before seen water greater than a pond or spring. “My surprise was mingled with no small fear when I was put into one of these canoes, and we began to paddle and move along the river,” he wrote. Within six months of leaving Essaka, Equiano arrived at the seacoast—and saw the looming masts of the slave ship towering over the trees. He was terrified.
“I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits,” he remembered. With long hair, strange language, and bright complexions, the white men seemed like hellish demons. The other black people about wore dejected looks and grim expressions. They talked anxiously of the fears of being eaten by the white men with their “horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.” Some slaves choked themselves to death by swallowing their tongues, others cut off their fingers to make themselves damaged goods, while still others just gave up the will to live and died. Equiano was horrified and despaired of ever returning to his native land. He watched as those who resisted the white men were savagely beaten, cut, and chained—even white sailors received this treatment on occasion. His initiation into the world of Atlantic slavery had begun.