ACT I: VIRGINIA — What Jamestown Actually Was

■ ACT I: VIRGINIA • JAMESTOWNETOJAMESTOWNE.COM • jamestownetojamestowne.com

Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana

Jamestown, the actual physical place, is a peninsula in the James River. The original English settlement of 1607 is partially underwater now — the river has shifted, and the ground the first colonists built on has been swallowed by the same water they crossed to reach it. What remains is an archaeological site, a reconstructed fort, a church tower from 1639 that is the oldest standing English structure in America, and a large monument to John Smith that the tourists photograph.

The monument to the twenty and odd Africans arrived later, and it is smaller. This is not a surprise. What surprises me, standing there, is how close everything is. The distance between the English colonial settlement and the water is much shorter than I imagined. The place where the transaction happened in 1619 — where labor was exchanged for food, where human beings became commodities in the English colonial economy — is a short walk from the reconstructed houses where the colonists lived.

Jamestown was not founded as a place of freedom. It was founded as a commercial enterprise. The Virginia Company of London sent colonists to the New World to generate profit — from timber, from trade with Indigenous peoples, from the extraction of whatever resources the land contained. When tobacco proved to be the resource that could generate sustained profit, the demand for labor became the central problem of the colony. The Africans who arrived in 1619 were the beginning of the answer to that problem. The answer generated four centuries of consequences.

Walking the site, I am aware that I am walking ground that most of the people who live in the country I spent fourteen years in have never walked. Most Americans have not been to Jamestown. Most African Americans have not been to Jamestown. The beginning of the story that produced their lives is a tourist attraction that most of them have never visited. This is not a moral failure on their part. It is a fact about how nations manage the parts of their history they would prefer not to make central.

I have been to Jamestown. I will go back. The ground deserves to be walked by people who understand what happened on it.

Born to Sarah, a girl

Sussex County, Virginia. On the flyleaf of a Bible kept by the Boisseau family, someone wrote, in ink gone the color of rust: Born to Sarah, a girl, March the 3rd, 1834. No name given for the girl. No clerk in Sussex County entered that birth in any book the courthouse kept.

The courthouse kept other books. In the personal property rolls for that year, a woman named Milly appears, entered among the county's taxable persons. Her daughter Sarah does not appear at all — too young yet to carry a value the county recognized. The state had a way of counting what it considered property. It had no way of counting a birth.

The Bible did not ask what the tax assessor asked. It did not require a witness the law recognized, or a birth worth a separate line in someone else's ledger. It required a hand that could write, and a household willing to believe the hand.

I am descended, four generations later, from the girl on that line. I have never seen the Bible itself. I have seen a photograph of the flyleaf, taken with a Polaroid camera in 1974 by a woman who drove from Petersburg to a farmhouse near Waverly because there was no other copy of it in the world.

She went to the courthouse first. It had no birth register from before 1866, and what it had after that spelled the family's name four different ways across four different decades, none of them the way the family spelled it.

She went to the farmhouse instead, and photographed a page that no government had ever asked to see, and that no government could now take away.

ACT I: VIRGINIA — The Year the Counting Begins

■ ACT I: VIRGINIA • JAMESTOWNETOJAMESTOWNE.COM • jamestownetojamestowne.com

Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana

1619 is not the beginning of African presence in North America. Africans had been present in Spanish colonial territories since the sixteenth century — as soldiers, as enslaved people, as explorers. Juan Garrido, a free African man, participated in the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1510s. Africans were present in what is now South Carolina and Florida before the English settled Jamestown at all.

But 1619 is the beginning of the specific system — the British colonial system of race-based chattel slavery — that would define the country that eventually became the United States of America. It is the beginning of the counting. Not the beginning of the story, but the beginning of the particular chapter of the story that produced the conditions in which I arrived in 2011.

When I came to Virginia, I came to a place that was already four hundred years deep. The roads I drove on, the neighborhoods I lived in, the institutions I navigated — all of them were built on top of those four hundred years. I did not know this in the way I know it now. I knew it abstractly, in the way that someone who has read history knows it. I did not know it in the body, which is the only way it finally makes sense.

The year 1619 matters because it establishes a before and an after. Before 1619, the Africans in Virginia existed in a legal gray area — some were treated as indentured servants, some acquired land, some even held other people in servitude. After 1619, and more precisely after the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, the category was fixed: Black meant enslaved, and enslaved was permanent and hereditary. The law closed a door that had been open. The counting of everything that followed begins here.

I am standing at the beginning of the count, trying to understand what it means to have arrived voluntarily in the same place where the involuntary arrival was recorded four centuries ago.

About This Journey

jamestownetojamestowne.com

Jamestowne to Jamestowne

Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana

Both places are named for the same man.

This project reverses a historical direction of travel and asks what becomes visible when the Atlantic is crossed knowingly, not abstractly.

Essays

1 published

01	ACT I: VIRGINIA — Point Comfort, Virginia

jamestownetojamestowne.com — Gabriel Mahia

ACT I: VIRGINIA — Point Comfort, Virginia

■ ACT I: VIRGINIA • JAMESTOWNETOJAMESTOWNE.COM • jamestownetojamestowne.com

Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana

There is a place called Point Comfort at the mouth of the James River in Virginia. In August 1619, a ship arrived there carrying twenty and odd Africans who had been seized from a Portuguese slave vessel in the Atlantic. They were sold to English colonists in exchange for food and supplies. The transaction was recorded. The names of the Africans were not.

I am an African. I am a Kenyan who came to Virginia in 2011, nearly four centuries after those first arrivals. I did not come on a ship. I came on a flight, with a passport, with paperwork that the country had agreed to honor. The conditions were different in every material sense. The geography was the same.

The reverse crossing is this: to travel from Jamestown, Virginia — the place where the African presence in what became the United States begins — to James Fort in Accra, Ghana, which is one of the departure points from which enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. To make the journey in the direction they were taken from. To arrive at the place they left. To complete, voluntarily and in full consciousness, the circuit that was broken in the seventeenth century.

This project began with a question I could not answer easily: what does it mean to be an African who came to America willingly, who served in its military, who built a life in its suburbs, who used its food pantries and bought his first car from a Honda dealership in Manassas, and who now lives in Nairobi — what does it mean to stand at Point Comfort and look at the water from which that history came?

I do not have the answer. I have the journey. This series of twenty-four essays, written over six years, is the attempt to find out what the answer is by making the crossing and recording what it shows me. The first act is Virginia. I am starting at the arrival point because the arrival point is where I am.