■ 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.