High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [17]
Surely, they must have wondered into what hell their fate had brought them. Then, came the rupture of another separation; this time the newly enslaved were torn from their shipmates, who had become a second family. They were taken off by their new owners to the destinies that awaited them in America. The transit was over; the sea change had taken place. They were bound to the fate of a new place.
AN EBOE FROM ESSAKA
Hanging on the walls of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, England, is an eighteenth-century portrait of a black man. The man is dressed in the clothing of the period: a scarlet waistcoat and an immaculate white stock, simply tied. He gazes at the observer from the canvas with a slight smile at the corners of his full mouth. The smile, though, does not reach his eyes, which are filled with sadness. The portrait, attributed to a member of the English school, is titled Portrait of a Negro Man, Olaudah Equiano.
Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was the individual who offered the earliest and most detailed account of his capture, enslavement, and journey to America in the Middle Passage. While many slave narratives detailed the lives of the enslaved in the nineteenth century, few portrayed eighteenth-century life, and even fewer still detailed the horrors of capture and the degradation of the Middle Passage. Much of what the world knows about the early period of the slave trade comes from his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Born an Igbo in what would become Nigeria, Equiano led an extraordinary life. Captured as a child, he was sold to various African masters and eventually found himself in the hands of white slave traders who shipped him to the colonies, where he was taken to Barbados and eventually sold in Virginia to Michael Pascal. His master was a naval captain, and as Pascal’s personal servant, Equiano accompanied him and traveled to Europe. With his master he saw action in the Seven Years’ War and was given rudimentary naval training. He also performed a variety of military duties aboard ship. During journeys with his master, which took him as far afield as the Mediterranean and Canada, he received an education and learned to read and write.
At the end of the war, however, Equiano did not reap the benefits that had been promised: prize money and freedom. Instead he was sold again, this time in the Caribbean, where travels had taken him. His education made him too valuable for plantation labor, and potential buyers were leery of acquiring a slave who could read and write and who knew how to navigate a ship. He was eventually sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia, who allowed Equiano to engage in his own trading activities and promised that he would free him upon payment of forty pounds. By his twenties, Equiano had earned enough through his trading to pay the debt and was a free man. As unscrupulous traders had attempted to re-enslave him during his Philadelphia sojourn, Equiano fully understood the perils of being a free black in federal America and declined King’s offer to remain there and become his business partner. Rather, he journeyed to England, where he spent the rest of his life as a public figure.
In 1789, three months before the storming of the Bastille, Equiano self-published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. The book was a runaway bestseller in London, directly influenced British attitudes toward slavery, and fueled the abolitionist cause. Equiano promoted the book assiduously, gave speeches, and became renowned and wealthy. When he died, eight years after the book’s publication,