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MOBILE, Ala. – Like almost everyone who grew up in Africatown, Felice Harris heard the story of her small neighborhood of Alabama, pbaded from parent to relative and from house to house.
It was the story of a group of western African transported to Alabama on the last slave ship to reach the United States. After the Civil War, they created and led a prosperous community.
Mrs. Harris, a retired kindergarten teacher, knew that historians have well documented the history of the ship and her human cargo, and she told her students each year. But she sometimes wondered how much the myth had infiltrated into history – because the ship, which was allegedly burned down and sank in nearby waters, had never been found again.
Last week, all these doubts evaporated. A team of researchers confirmed that a submerged wooden wreck, located in the mud a few kilometers upstream of the colony of Africatown, was probably the schooner Clotilda, who had transported to Alabama the 110 Africans kidnapped since the current Beninese nation. in 1860.
Historians have praised this discovery as a crucial missing piece of larger American history. At Africatown, a group of semi-isolated cottages located three miles north of downtown Mobile, the news bore a special weight. Something physical, something measurable, was now attached to the narrative that they had heard all their lives.
"Now it's like letting us know that it's really real," said Mrs. Harris, 58, "It's real."
While it is too early to say whether the Clotilda will be elevated or restored – and if so, where exactly will it go – the Africatown inhabitants already dream that the bones of the ship will reside with them, serving not only the past but the future, attracting tourists and arousing a much-needed renaissance.
"We think it might look like Jamestown," said 68-year-old Joe Womack, referring to early settlement and tourist attraction in Virginia. "Jamestown and Africatown."
The story of Clotilda's last trip began with an Alabama plantation and owner of the steamboat, Timothy Meaher. As tensions between the North and the South approached a breaking point before the civil war, Meaher bet on being able to bring enslaved Africans into the heart of the American cotton country, despite the fact that they were in danger. The federal government 's ban on imports in force since 1808 arose out of a dispute between the pbadengers of one of Mr. Meaher' s steamers over the question of whether they were safe or not. it was still possible to transport slaves from Africa between the United States and Africa.
The stakes were high: such contraband was punishable by hanging. To avoid being spotted, the schooner's captain, William Foster, set fire to the ship and sank it after unloading its human cargo.
The captives were men, women and children from different cultures and speaking several languages. They had undergone a 45-day transatlantic trip, during which they had been stripped naked and given only small sips of water daily, according to the book "Dreams of Africa in Alabama" by historian Sylviane Anna Diouf. . Some of the captives were sold upstream. Mr. Meaher and his family kept 60 of them.
They were in a country that already sheltered 3.9 million slaves, according to the census figures of 1860. In Alabama alone, there were more than 435,000 slaves. The free labor they provided made the state one of the most prodigious cotton producers of the South, where many politicians viewed slavery as a case to be left to individual States.
Over the last few decades, the community that they eventually created has experienced a sharp economic decline. Several nearby factories and industrial plants have died, including a paper mill employing hundreds of people. An autonomous commercial network died with them. Grocery stores, beauty salons, a fish market, a gas station and a fruit stand have all disappeared.
"We are a desert of food," said Cleon Jones, 76, a former New York Mets baseball player who grew up in Africatown and came back in the 1970s after helping the team win the day. in 1969 in the World Series. He now serves as a kind of unofficial mayor.
Jones said the population has declined to less than 2,000 from a peak of 12,000 a few decades ago. The small, well-kept houses are adjacent to the others that are locked up in ruined houses.
A reception center was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. At the corner of the street, a mural by local artist Labarron Lewis represents Clotilde gliding across the water under a serene blue sky.
The management and guardianship of what remains of the Clotilde is now the responsibility of the state of Alabama. The vessel is still entirely upstream of the river, near a place called Twelvemile Island. On Thursday, the day after the announcement of the ship's identity, Ben Raines, the documentary filmmaker and former journalist who found it, headed for the island by motor boat, following Clotilda's last trajectory.
Mr. Raines, 49, and the son of Howell Raines, former editor of The New York Times, announced in January 2018 that he may have discovered Clotilda. It turned out to be wrong at that time and the story became a source of embarrbadment for him. But some of the friends he made at Africatown during his expeditions urged him not to quit the search.
Sixty-year-old Thelma Maiben-Owens, director of a community garden in Africatown, wrote an old religious song in her ear: "There is a good side somewhere. Do not stop until you find it. "
On the water, Mr. Raines headed north, past the towering cranes of Mobile Harbor and then Africatown, until the banks of the river were filled with cypress and hazelnut palms, as wild as they were. they were to appear in 1860.
An orange buoy floated near where Mr. Raines had found a second ship. the one the experts now recognize is Clotilde. A boat from the Alabama Marine Resources Police was moored there, and a man was fixing a camera to a tree.
Mr. Raines said the wreck was maybe five feet below the surface, largely intact, and "frozen in the mud".
A large number of men and women left on the shore by Mr. Foster had hoped to return to Africa at the end of the civil war, but their plans proved inapplicable and they found themselves stuck. So they established Africatown, their own American colony, in 1866 or 1868.
Some families bought land from former slave masters – Meaher, according to Diouf's book, refused to give up land. They chose as leader an African man of noble birth, who finally changed his name and now calls himself Peter Lee.
In the middle of the 20th century, Africatown was booming. Mr. Jones and other members of his generation described a place where workers went to their factory work and where neighbors shared the generosity of redfish and speckled trout caught on the river. But pride was complicated at the time, said Jones, pointing out that many Americans had a distorted view of the meaning of what was meant by "African".
"Africa was stigmatized," he said. "I remember going to Prichard Park as a young teenager – the white boys would say, 'Go back to Africa'.
"My reaction has always been:" Bring me back! You brought me here.
Joycelyn Davis, 42, is a direct descendant of the sixth generation of a Clotilda survivor, Charlie Lewis. For years, she did not want to celebrate the story of her family.
"Who wants to know that you have been brought on a bet?" She says.
But as she grew up, she read about her past and the achievements of Clotilda's survivors. "S 'flourish and strive to settle and start their own home with fewer resources," she said. "It reinforces my sense of pride. This shame has been reduced to nothing. "
Nowadays, the neighborhood is a mix of pride, difficulty and hope, celebrating the past and fighting it.
Mr. Womack is co-founder of an environmental group and one of many plaintiffs in Africatown in a lawsuit accusing International Paper, the operator of the paper production plant shuttered, to release harmful chemicals into the community. (The company denied committing a wrongdoing).
Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Maiben-Owens, director of community gardens, showed the empty grounds where the stores were, but also the garden, rich in spring heat with peas, corn, okra and sugar cane.
She showed a twisted brick fireplace, the venerated remains of Peter Lee's house. She showed the old cemetery, with her large commemorative plaque, in memory of Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis, who was on the Clotilda and died in 1935, one of the last survivors of the Middle Pbadage.
And she showed the disorder where the reception center was. It is expected that this replacement will be financed by BP's settlement funds after a huge oil spill from an offshore platform in 2010. The new community center, said Mrs. Maiben-Owens, belongs to the Clotilda.
"Nobody talked about this ship until they found it," she said. "Now, they probably want to put it in Montgomery or something, where it does not belong."
Dr. Diouf said in an interview Saturday that the next chapter of the Clotilda might not be settled for years. "But hope that this infamous boat will bring something good to the community," she said. "It's the only hope. Because the ship itself is a horror ship. "
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