They call me Jenny, but my name is Abebi. I live in the cotton fields, in a row house down by the river, where the big house casts a shadow over everything in the evening. It’s in Virginia, outside a place called Jamestown, but I am not of this land, my blood runs in Nigeria. I was born 1813 in the savanna, where the wild beasts roam, and raised where the waterfalls washed the dust from my hair, and smelled sweet and clean. Nothing like the muddy water of the south. I don’t think I’ll ever make it back there, but my heart can never rest here. This place is not my home.
It had been a hard year; not enough to eat anywhere, when the men came to speak to my father. They were dressed strangely, in a style that I have learned was distinctly Western, and they spoke to my father with many hand gestures toward me and my sisters (Ipsen, 191). Finally, three of us were pulled out of our beds, and inspected, like cattle. They looked at our skin, our teeth, our nails, and even our most private parts, nodding in approval, and reaching into their pockets for coin. When we were told to get dressed. They shook hands with my father, and exited our small hut. “You will go with them” my father said, gesturing toward the door. “They will take you where there is food, where there is enough,” and while I am sure that he believed those words, and the promises they held, a greater lie has never been spoken.
We were made to wait, in a stinking hole crammed with bodies for weeks (PBS 1). There was food, but it was rotten, and insufficient to our needs, and the water was foul smelling. My youngest sister Ola was near starved when our father passed us into bondage, and was weak and frail long before we reached the slave factories of the West. She died there, in those dungeons without ever seeing the land of plenty our father had promised (PBS 1).
Roughly six weeks after we left our fathers homes, we were chained in a line with other women, from many nations, and loaded onto ships (PBS 1). It was clear that the men who had brought us here believed us to be the same as these women, but we didn’t even speak the same languages. There were from across Africa, from lands I had never seen, and they were as foreign to me as the rock of the boat, and the lands we traveled to. Most of the women I was chained to would never make it to American soil, as promised. A few were ridden with disease, disease for which the rest of us had no resistance, and many, including my older sister Kambiri would succumb to it (PBS 1).
It was there that I learned of the smell of scorched flesh. We were branded by our new “owner,” marked not as people, but as property. Our rights were gone to us- robbed even of our right to die (PBS 1). Those who thought they would simply starve, rather than live as another man’s property were tortured into submission, because the reality of our situation was that we were worth more alive. We were a financial asset, and so, our ability to arrive in America whole was to be protected at any cost, but in the most horrific ways possible.
So few of us would survive our travel through the Middle Passage, that it felt almost miraculous when the boat stopped rocking, marking our approach toward land. When we disembarked in North America, we were glad to see dry land, but feared what was to come. We did not know if this would, in fact, be the land of promise, or if our torture, and the loss of our humanity would continue, forever.
Our first moments upon reaching the Americas made us feel like more than chattel; we were respected, cared for, and protected. The crew from the ship took us ashore and helped us wash, shave, and generally restore both our cleanliness and humanity. They rubbed our wounds with palm oil, and bandaged those that could not simply be soothed with salve (International Slavery Museum 1). Unfortunately, this respite and sense of humanity was not to last. Families who had clung to one another on the journey were torn apart, tenuous friendships created aboard the ship shattered, and lives ruined anew, as we were sold into the hands of our new America masters, to work plantations across the new world’s southern boarders (International Slavery Museum 1).
We were placed in a kind of stable, for four days, while potential buyers could come and look us over, inspect us (Eyewitness to History 1). They asked questions, “Can you sew,” in languages we could not understand, so we mostly just stood with our heads facing down, stock still, letting them look their fill, and hoping that whoever ultimately purchased us would be kind in the months to come. For most of us, that wish was in vain. I was purchased, alone, for $327 dollars by a man and a lady in a dress nearly as wide as she was tall, she said that I was “not too pretty” and looking like I could ‘outwork the horse” (Economic History Association 1).
This moment was the beginning of the worse days of my life. Though my master and his wife were far less cruel than many, there was a standing political opinion in he day that Africa had to be stripped from us in order to make good slaves. The more we forgot our homeland, our religion, our language, and our way of life, the more we would submit to the demands of our master, obey his command, and serve his plantation loyally. This process, locally known as seasoning, forced us to learn English, the primary language of the Americas, and pushed all black slaves to become a single nation, rather than harboring loyalty to their own homelands (Understanding Slavery 1).
It was during this year that I was given my “Christian” name, Jenny, branded a second time, forever marking me as property of one Jeremiah North, given clothing that represented the cotton fields of which I would become a part, and stripped of my African identity down to my bones. Those who resisted were tortured, scalded and whipped until their African heart bled out on the ground, and was no more. Some took their own lives rather than surrendering, others simply died because their body could bear no more. The rest of us, simply learned to conform to the picture of slavery that they were painting for us. We became Jenny, Toby, and Sam, harboring our true names only as distant memories, and hoping one day to take them up again, if we could navigate our way back to freedom, but submitting, at least for a time, to our master’s demands.
We are made to attend “chuch” lead by our masters, with sermons that are directed to keep us down. They teach that it is God’s will that we act in submission to our masters. It was further believed that a slave would "do better for their masters' profit than formerly, for they are taught to serve out of Christian love and duty," (Galli 3). However, in secret we met and we prayed that we could find a way out of this bondage, and into a life that was our own. Where we were equal men among one another, and where no one had the privilege to beat us ever again. For me, this day would never come. But, I didn’t let this keep me from praying.
Today, I can’t remember the sound of Nigerian dawn, but I can tell you that the frogs sing when spring comes to the plantation. I know that cotton is averaging 8.2 cents per pound, but a good overseer can get nine, but working beside my mother in our own hut is a distant memory (Walker, 1866). I have birthed four children of my own, nursed many that were not my own, and seen them all sold away from my arms before they could learn how hard their lives would be, and certainly before they built any lasting memories of me. I have bowed by head in prayer to a white man’s God, in hopes that he will save me from my sorrows, and accepted solitude to avoid the pain of losing those I love again and again through the trade of man that can no longer be free. But, in all that, I have never accepted that I am Jenny. I allow them to see this Jenny that they have created, but in my heart of hearts, I am, and will always be Abebi. The Nigerian girl who walked the Savanna, and reveled in the sounds and smells of the waterfalls.
Works Cited:
Economic History Association. “Slavery in the United States” Economic Encyclopedia. 2016. Web.
Eye Witness to History. “Slave Auction, 1859.” 19th Century Witness. 2016. Web
Galli, Mark. “The Inconceivable Start of African-American Christianity” Christianity Today (2014, Feb 21). Web.
International Slave Museum. “Arrival in the Americas” The History of Slave Trade . 2016. Web.
Ipsen, Pernille. Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. University of Pennsylvania Press. 2015. Print.
PBS. “The Middle Passage.” The Terrible Transformation: Africans in America. N.d. Web.
Understanding Slavery. “Atlantic Crossing” The Understanding Slavery Initiative. 2011. Web.
Walker Amasa. The Science Of Wealth: A Manual Of Political Economy Hobokon, NY: John Wilson & Sons. 1866. Print.
