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Zora Neale Hurston's Story of a Former Slave Finally Comes to Print- good read
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/zora-neale-hurstons-story-of-a-former-slave-finally-comes-to-print?mb<snip>
Captain William Foster left Mobile in secret and returned the same way. On July 8, 1860, he dropped anchor in the waters off the coast of Mississippi, hid his cargo below deck, slipped ashore, and travelled overland to fetch a tugboat from Alabama. By then, Foster and his ship had survived a hurricane, a mutiny, an ambush, and a transatlantic journey, but late that Sunday night, after the tug carried him up the Mobile River to Twelve Mile Island, the Captain emptied his hold, dismissed his crew, and set fire to his ship. The Clotilda, Foster would forever after complain, was worth more than his share of what it had smuggled.
Although the international slave trade had been outlawed in America more than half a century earlier, Foster and three co-conspirators, a trio of brothers by the name of Meaher, had purchased a hundred and twenty-five men, women, and children, from Benin and Nigeria, to traffic them into the United States. The plan had been hatched a year before, when one of the Meahers got into an argument: a New Yorker insisted that slaves could no longer be transported across the Atlantic, a Louisiana planter wagered a hundred dollars that it could be done, and Timothy Meaher bet a thousand that he could be the one to do it.
The market for slaves had grown tremendously in the previous five decades. Absent imports, slavers relied on reproduction and relocation for their supply, and, as labor-intensive agriculture shifted to the Deep South, more than a million enslaved people were forced there by ship, rail, and sometimes by foot, in coffles. By the middle of the nineteenth century, domestic slave prices were so high that many planters had begun lobbying to reopen the global trade.
Among them were the Meahers, who had moved from Maine to Alabama, where they owned sawmills, steamboats, plantations, and people. To increase their holdings and win the bet, they recruited Foster, a Nova Scotian shipbuilder, and chose the Clotilda from among his ships. Although the schooner was fast enough to evade capture, it had to be refitted as a slave ship, with a false deck to conceal the necessary barrels of water, rice, beef, pork, sugar, flour, bread, molasses, and rum. Foster sailed from Mobile Bay with papers that claimed he was delivering lumber to St. Thomas, and eleven crew members who had not been told of their real mission. The nine thousand dollars in gold stashed on board to pay for the slaves played havoc with the ship’s compass, taking it off course; after that, a hurricane caught it just north of Bermuda. While repairing the ship, Foster’s men discovered the hidden deck, and threatened to alert the authorities.
12 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
There's a Mental Health Center, now private, on Gordon Drive, where I used to work, not that far from Pritchard.
the drugs were moving in pretty fast in that area, as I recall.
Did not know the story of Africa Town at the time.
thanks for the doc.
thanx for the link, my friend.
Response to malaise (Original post)
tonight's bedtime reading. Thanks, Malaise.
the book will go on my reading list.
