■ 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.