Born in a small New England, working-class town and later
schooled in New York City, I could not even claim the black heritage
of Southerners whose families still maintained Southern ties in North
Carolina, Georgia, even the godforsaken state of Mississippi. The black
families I was raised around came from Maine or Boston, like my father.
They baked codfish, stewed chicken, and ate boiled dinners. Down
home to my relatives went as far south as Rhode Island, not the Deep
South depicted in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The influx of particular kind of slaves in America began with the
advent of “rice Negroes” almost 235 years before the end of slavery
with the arrival of a Dutch ship to Virginia. They would later be iden-
tified as Gullah, a scion of slaves who were captured and brought to
America specifically because they knew how to cultivate and grow rice
crops.3
“Sails furled, flag drooping at her rounded stern, she rode the tide in
from the sea. She was a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a fright-
ening ship, a ship of mystery,” wrote J. Saunders Redding, a black
writer describing the landing of a slave ship to North America in
1619. Redding’s observation documents the arrival of a slave ship to
the English settlement called Jamestown. “Whether she was trader,
privateer or man-of-war, no one knows. Through her bulwarks black
mouth cannon yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a mot-
ley [bunch]. She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone.
Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous
freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves,” Redding wrote in his book, They
Came in Chains: Americans from
Africa.4
If accurate, Redding’s nar-
rative captures something larger than the arrival of the first slaves to
the New World; it also marks the seeding of African American culture.
“There is not a country in world history in which racism has been
more important, for so long a time as the United States,” said historian
Howard Zinn in the opening pages of his book, A People’s History of
the United States,
1492–Present.5
“And the problem of ‘the color line’
as W.E.B. Du Bois put it in the 1920s, is still with us. Slavery devel-
oped quickly into a regular institution and became the basis for the
standard labor relation of blacks to whites in the New World. With
it developed that special racial feeling—whether hatred, or contempt,
or pity, or patronization that accompanied the inferior position of
blacks in America for the next 350 years—that combination of
inferior status and derogatory thought we call racism,” Zinn said.
Unshackled by civil war that freed millions of black slaves by the
year 1865, living generations of former slaves, their children and
From Exodus to the Rise of Harlem as a Cultural Center 3
