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[US-Sierra Leone Slavery History with Interview of Joe Opala]

BY PAUL DAVIS
Providence Journal Bulletin Staff Writer
February 13 – 15, 2005

No one knows her real name.  As a little girl she sang and played games in a village 100 miles from the West African coast. Beneath a grass roof she slept on a bed of clay. During the growing season, nearly 200 inches of rain pelted the tall palms and spiky grasslands. But when the sun broke through, the rice and fields sparkled like emeralds.  Dressed only in a lapa, or skirt, the girl carried water in a pot on her head, fetched firewood or swept the floor of her family's stick-and-mud house.

In the spring and summer, her family worked in the sprawling rice fields. The girl pulled weeds or sharpened hoes, sometimes in heavy rain. In a society where elders were revered, children worked.  It was nothing like the horror to come.

In 1756, slave traders raided her village. The Africans -- probably from the interior Fula, Susu or Mandingo tribes -- slashed the air with European or locally made swords and fired muskets made in England , Germany or Holland . They may have slaughtered babies or disemboweled some of the elders.  The raiders marched the girl and other captives down dirt footpaths to the coast. Adults were tied together by ropes around their necks; ropes bound their wrists, too. Some carried cow hides, ivory tusks and wax, goods valued by white buyers.

The little girl may have been sold to an African trader, a middleman operating along a river route. She may have been delivered to an African, European or Afro-European buyer stationed at a coastal trading post, where a dozen or more men lived in mud huts.  Or she may have been ferried to Bunce Island, a British slave-trading fort in the the Sierra Leone River. Employing between 50 and 75 whites, it was one of 40 slave castles on the African coast, and the only major British fort along the Rice Coast, a region stretching from modern Senegal in the north to Liberia in the south.

In the late 1600s, the Royal African Company of England had built a commercial fort on the island. Around 1750, the London firm of Grant, Sargent and Oswald added a shipyard and a fleet of vessels to scour the Rice Coast for slaves.  On Bunce Island, a lookout tower loomed above a high-walled holding pen for the African captives, who were separated by age and sex. Canons pointed inward at the prison.  On the African shore, the girl awaited her fate.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the world, William Vernon and his brother Samuel counted on the trading posts of western africa to help maintain their place in Newport society.   William prayed at the Second Congregational Church, spoke several languages and read widely. A founding member of the city's Artillery Company, he was "known all over the continent of America," noted a French observer.  And Newport was known all over the world. From 1725 to 1807, more than 900 Newport vessels shipped 100,000 Africans to the Caribbean, Brazil and the colonies.

Newport ships carried rum to West Africa and traded it and other goods for Africans. The captives were then carried to the West Indies or the colonies. Ships returning from South Carolina carried barrels of rice; those from the West Indies carried sugar and molasses, to make more rum.  Newport's noisy waterfront was rimmed by rope makers, rum distilleries, taverns, sail lofts, snuff-makers and chocolate grinders. The smell of cocoa and molasses clashed with the stink of fish, boiling alcohol and whale guts used to make candles.

Before the Revolution, nearly a fifth of Newport's population was black. And a third of the city's residents owned at least one slave; many families would own more.  Advertisements in the Newport Gazette touted the arrival of "extremely fine, healthy, well limb'd Gold Coast slaves, men, women, boys and girls. Gentlemen in town and country have now an opportunity to furnish themselves with such as will suit them . . . "

William and his older brother, who had formed a trading firm in the 1750s, owned a sloop named the Hare.  On Nov. 8, 1755, Capt. Caleb Godfrey received orders from the Vernons. Godfrey, they said, must take the "first favorable Wind" and "proceed directly to the Coast of Africa, where being arrived you are at Liberty to trade at such Places as you think most for our Interest.

"Don't purchase any small or old Slaves," they cautioned. Instead, they said, buy young males who "answer better than Women." When his ship was full of slaves he should "Keep a watchful Eye over 'em and give them no Opportunity of making an Insurrection, and let them have a Sufficiency of good Diet, as you are Sensible your Voyage depends up their Health."

Godfrey was a tough, experienced slaver. If crew members became drunk or unruly, he put them in chains. Crew members cursed at him. Once, he turned his back on a leopard chained aboard ship in Sierra Leone. The leopard clawed his neck. After four days in the infirmary, he was back at the helm.   He crossed the Atlantic with a 15-man crew and steered his sloop along Africa's west coast, following the prevailing winds and currents.

It was tricky terrain, populated by slave raiders, African kings, traders and middlemen. No single polity -- European or African -- ruled the region. African chiefs demanded gifts and cordial relationships. Trading posts operated from every river mouth. Malaria thrived in the hot, humid climate.

Using a pidgin English to bicker, Godfrey bought goods and slaves from the Rio Pongo River to the Sierra Leone River, a 100-mile stretch.  He used the British fort at Bunce Island as a base.  "It was a seller's market," says Joseph Opala, an anthropologist at James Madison University in Virginia. "They tried to give him poorer quality slaves for high prices."

On April 9, 1756, Godfrey wrote the Vernons a brief letter.  "I have now Eighty Slaves aboard and Expect to Sale for Carolina tomorrow my Vessl is in Good order Clean tallowd down to the Keel."  Among them was the little girl.

GODFREY HAD TIMED his voyage carefully, arriving in Africa at a time when the rivers were navigable. He left before the heavy rains erased trade paths and flooded local rivers.  Aboard the Hare, the men were kept below deck in chains. The women and children, in separate quarters, had more freedom, but they also had to cook or clean.  Godfrey left no record of his treatment of the Hare's cargo. 

But for many Africans, the transatlantic voyage, called the "Middle Passage," was intolerable.  Some captains packed the slaves so close together they could barely move.  When the Africans were taken on deck for exercise, some tried to escape. Rebels were tortured or killed.

"Troublemakers, or those driven mad by their capture, were cut into pieces and hung from the mast, or beaten slowly to death to quiet the others," Opala says.  On the 10-week voyage, 13 captives died, most of them children.  The crew members threw their bodies in the ocean at night.

Such deaths were not unusual, says Opala. Captains and investors expected a certain number of Africans -- 15 percent -- to die; they factored the deaths into the cost of doing business. "The real horror was not that they were mistreated," says Opala, "but that the slave traders treated them as perishables."

Two million Africans died during the Middle Passage. A historian would later remark that, if the Atlantic were to dry up, it would reveal a scattered pathway of human bones, marking the various routes of the traders.  Says Opala: "It was mass murder in the name of commerce."

IN CHARLESTON, S.C., the slave trader Henry Laurens fretted.  He wrote letters -- sometimes two a day -- urging traders to visit other ports.  A junior partner in the firm Austin & Laurens, the 30-year-old Laurens had already made plenty of money by exporting lumber, rum and indigo, and importing slaves. Between 1735 and 1740, Charleston -- or Charles Town -- imported 12,589 African slaves.

After the colony's start, South Carolinians were producing so much rice that they paid their taxes with it. Slaves were needed to dig ditches and turn swamps into rice paddies. The planters preferred Africans from the Rice and Windward Coasts, where the villagers had been growing and harvesting rice for hundreds of years.

But in 1756, the market slumped. Freight and insurance costs were up, and profits were down. Carolina's rice growers could find few buyers for their crop, and they worried that England and France would soon go to war. Meanwhile, too many slave ships had glutted the market.  "Our planters are become very slack all at once," Laurens noted.  Five days before Godfrey's arrival, Laurens urged the Vernons in a letter to send Godfrey elsewhere. "Everything would be against him was he now to come here."  It was too late. Godfrey arrived on June 17.

Like other Africans coming into the port, Godfrey's slaves had to spend 10 days to three weeks in a brick "pest house" in Charleston harbor, five miles from the shore.  Worried about malaria, yellow fever and other diseases, the city had erected the Lazaretto, or plague hospital, on Sullivan's Island. The sick stayed in the 16-by-30-foot house until they recovered, or died. 

Alexander Gardner, a port physician, reported frequently on the health conditions aboard incoming slave galleys. Their holds, he said, were filled with "Filth, putrid Air, and putrid Dysenteries . . . it is a wonder any escape with Life."  In letters, Laurens called Godfrey's captives a "wretched cargo." But he told a different story in an advertisement in the Gazette.  "Just imported in the Hare Capt. Caleb Godfrey, directly from Sierra-Leon, a Cargo of Likely and Healthy SLAVES, to be sold upon easy Terms."

The sale went poorly. Growers called the slaves "refuse" and were angry at having traveled 80 to 90 miles. By July 5, Austin & Laurens had been able to sell only 42 Africans. "God knows what we shall do with those that remain," Laurens wrote. "They are a most scabby flock," suffering from a contagious skin disease, sore eyes and infirmity.

Godfrey had other problems, too. Three slaves died while awaiting sale. His crew accused him of rough treatment, threatened him with legal action and finally abandoned him in Charleston.

"What I have is But in poor order having a Passage of almost Ten Weeks and the Slaves has rec'd Damage a Laying . . . I thought by my Purchase I Should have made you a good Voyage but fear the Low markit and Mortality Shall miss of my Expectation . . . " Godfrey wrote the Vernons.

ON JUNE 30, 1756, RICE GROWER Elias Ball Jr. bought the little girl and four other children for 460 pounds.  Mild-mannered, in his mid-40s, he owned two plantations, Comingtee and Kensington, both on the Cooper River, north of Charleston.  He slept on a hand-carved mahogany bed. He sent his boys to local academies run by European teachers, where they studied mathematics and rhetoric. The girls learned French and how to sew and dance.

Ball gave the children English names, Peter, Brutus and Harry. . . . He called the little girl Priscilla and marked her age in his ledger as 10.  Priscilla lived for another 55 years as a slave on the Commingtee plantation, where Africans cut pine trees, cleared land and dug irrigation ditches in the swamps.  Priscilla took a mate, Jeffrey. She had 10 children. She died in 1811 and was buried in a clearing on the plantation, near the Cooper River.

Her grave cannot be found. But a record of her life -- her purchase, her children and her death -- survived in the Ball family's slave lists, ledgers and receipts.

Peace Corps worker Joseph Opala went to Africa to help villagers grow rice.  On a hill cleared by farmers, the 24-year-old anthropologist found something else: pottery shards and stone tools in the dirt above the Rokel River.  Looking further, he found glass beads and broken bits of tobacco pipes.  What were European beads and colonial pipes doing in the rice fields of Sierra Leone?  "Ultimately, it dawned on me," he says. "I was on a major slave route."

Opala was standing on an 18th-century footpath used by slave raiders to march Africans to the coast. The raiders -- who terrorized villagers with swords and guns -- sold Africans to coastal traders or British slave ships headed to North America or the West Indies.  But where did the ships come from? And where did they go?  Opala, who grew up in Oklahoma, would spend the next 30 years looking for answers.  "I did not expect to follow the clues to Newport," he says.

WITH BACKING from the University of Sierra Leone, Opala opened an archaeology lab in 1977 and began unearthing more artifacts in sites around the village of Bumbuna.  The U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, Michael Samuels, had heard about Opala's project and told him he was digging in the wrong place. You ought to go to Bunce Island, he said.  So it was that Opala took a boat to the small island, in the wide mouth of the Sierra Leone River. The island once housed the largest slave fort on Africa's Rice Coast, an area that stretched from modern-day Senegal to Liberia. In the 1700s, the British added offices, a shipyard and a holding pen for stolen Africans.

Now, half hidden by tree roots, some walls rose as high as 40 feet. Tropical light filtered through crumbled windows, doorways and arches, some 20 miles from Freetown, the country's capital.  At the north end, Opala stood on the jetty where thousands of Africans had been exiled from their villages.  Sifting through the sand on the beach, he found shards from centuries-old wine and gin bottles.  Opala had come to Africa to study prehistoric tools and cultures in a world far from his own.  Instead, he was staring at America's dark past.

OPALA STUDIED gravestones, combed through two dumps, and, back in Freetown, found early descriptions of the slave fort.  But he wanted something more. He wanted an oral account of what had happened on that island. He sought out an elder in the village of Sangbulima on the nearby island of Tasso who might help.  What do you know? Opala asked.  The chief pointed downriver, toward the ocean. "The white people took our people," he said. He paused. "They took them to Europe, where they died from the cold."

No, no, Opala said in Krio, a mix of English and African languages. They didn't go to Europe. They went to America. And they didn't all die. Many did, on the passage over, but many others survived and stayed in America.  The chief asked, "America is a rich country, isn't it?"  Yes, Opala said.  The chief smiled.  "That means I have family in a rich country. That is good news."

At the elder's request, Opala stayed to tell the same story to the other villagers, some of them fishermen.  Suddenly, everything Opala ever knew about black history tumbled out. Africans in chains, crowded slave ships, cotton plantations, the Civil War, emancipation, Abraham Lincoln, segregation, voting rights, even the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy.  The villagers listened intently to the stranger's story.

OPALA RETURNED to Bunce Island haunted that he may have misled the villagers. After all, he really didn't know how many Africans from Sierra Leone had been brought to the New World, or what happened to them when they arrived.

Back in the United States, Opala tried to find out. One of his first discoveries was a collection of the letters of Henry Laurens, a slave trader in Charleston, S.C. Laurens, a junior partner in the trading firm Austin & Laurens, specialized in importing slaves from the Rice Coast.  Laurens worked closely with Richard Oswald, one of the British owners of the Bunce Island slave fort.  Every year, Oswald's agents dispatched several ships to Charleston, each carrying between 250 and 350 slaves.

The South Carolina colonists, who grew rice from Asia in the swamps of the low country, were willing to pay high prices for slaves from the Sierra Leone region because they had rice-growing skills.  That's why Austin & Laurens advertised healthy Negroes for sale, "just arrived from the Windward & Rice Coast."

Opala had found a link between Bunce Island and South Carolina. More important, he knew that the culture the slaves had brought with them from West Africa in the 1700s had survived.  By 1708, blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina, a unique situation among the Colonies.  After the Civil War, the freed slaves continued to live in isolation, in rural areas and on the Sea Islands along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts.

Called the Gullah, they made baskets for husking rice, just as the slaves and the Africans had done centuries earlier. They ate rice at every meal. And they painted their doors blue, to scare off evil spirits.  As late as the 1940s, a black linguist found Gullahs who could recite songs and stories in the African languages of Mende and Vai.  Their English-based language was similar to the Krio spoken in Sierra Leone. Some expressions -- like bigyai, or greedy -- were identical.  Opala could tell the old African chief where his people had gone.

OPALA RETURNED to Sierra Leone in 1985, to teach.  At a lecture at the U.S. Embassy, he talked about the slave- trade connection between Bunce Island and Charleston. Near the end, he mentioned the Gullah people. The Sierra Leone slaves, he said, had gone to South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

"It was like I had dropped a match into a tank of gasoline," Opala says.  Newspapers and radio stations reported Opala's discovery. A new phrase appeared: the Gullah Connection.  "It created a popular sensation," says Opala. "Because Sierra Leone is a tiny little country, it never occurred to them that their people were concentrated in a part of America.

"Every community and church group wanted me to speak. They wanted to know everything about the Gullah. Do they make that dish? This dish? They wanted to know if these people were their lost twins."

When the country's president, Joseph Momoh, visited the United States in 1988, he made a special trip to Charleston to visit a Gullah community on St. Helena Island off the South Carolina coast.  A year later, more than a dozen Gullahs from the United States visited Sierra Leone in a "homecoming" chronicled in the documentary film Families Across the Sea.

"Two hundred and fifty years ago, we were all one," said a Sierra Leone chief, in a welcoming speech. Added a government official: "History separated us, but history has now brought us back together."

In 1992, when Colin Powell visited Bunce Island, he said little as Opala showed him the site.  In his autobiography, My American Journey, Powell recalls what he was thinking during that visit. "I am an American . . . but today, I am something more. I am an African too. I feel my roots here in this continent."

Opala stayed 12 years, during which he made many connections between the two continents. But could he trace a specific person from Africa to America? He could not.  But someone else could.

AS A BOY, Edward Ball had heard stories about his family's slave plantations on the Cooper River. As a man, the stories darkened his dreams.  Born in Savannah, Ga., Ball left the deep South to study at Brown University. Later, he wrote a column for the Village Voice of New York.

Then, in 1995, he moved into a moldy Ball mansion in Charleston. From there, he could walk to the southern tip of the city, where his ancestors had purchased slaves kidnapped from Africa's west coast.  He felt accountable. He wanted to explain how his ancestors had amassed nearly 4,000 slaves during a 167-year span, from 1698 to 1865. He wanted to tell the stories of the slaves, too.

Working independently, and using the empty Ball house as a base, he pored over 18th-century family records kept in libraries, universities and historical societies in two states.  The Ball family, he discovered, had entered the slave business "in the birth hours of America."

In 1698, 22-year-old Elias Ball sailed to Charleston from Devon, England, to claim his uncle's inheritance. By then, the colony's slave trade was thriving. On the docks, nearly every other person was black.   Young Elias inherited 20 slaves and the 740-acre Comingtee plantation, a tract of cypress trees, mucky swamp, and pine, oak and magnolia trees in St. John's Parish.

The first of many Ball land owners, he left 1,000 acres to Elias Jr., who later purchased Limerick plantation to add to his holdings. A daughter, Eleanor, married the slave trader Henry Laurens.  "I knew a lot about the Balls, but I never knew much about the slaves," Edward wrote in his award-winning book, Slaves in the Family. "What were their names? How did they live? Who were their loved ones?"

TO FIND some answers, Ball started reading the family's 10,000 papers -- mottled, worm-eaten ledgers, letters, slave lists and receipts.  Early in his research, Ball discovered a letter written to his father's grandfather, Isaac Ball. The 1926 letter, from a freed slave, P. Henry Martin, began, "Dear Mas' Issac."  Martin wrote that he was sorry to hear that Isaac's wife had died. "I consider all Balls are connected with my old Master. I have them to respect."

The letter had a return address: Pinewood, S.C.   Ball started calling all the Martins in the area.  He found P. Henry Martin's grandson Thomas.  It was 1995.  The first time they spoke, Thomas Martin, retired after years of teaching and working as an assistant principal, told Ball that he had been trying to find out more about his grandfather.  P. Henry Martin had died in 1933, when Thomas Martin was only a few months old. Before his death, the elder Martin had created a family tree, beginning with his own generation.  Thomas didn't know much else about his ancestors.

But by then, Ball did.  He found out more later, and shared what he knew.  P. Henry Martin was born, simply, as Henry, to a slave on Oct. 6, 1855, at Limerick plantation. He was 9 when, on a Sunday in February, federal soldiers rode onto the plantation and told the slaves they were free.

Henry took the surname Martin and attended one of the first schools for blacks in the area. He married, worked as a carpenter, and helped found a black church in Charleston, where he gave sermons.  He had 10 children. The second child, Peter Henry Martin Jr., a roofer, was Thomas Martin's father.

Did Thomas want to see Limerick plantation, where P. Henry Martin was a slave? Ball asked.  The two men visited the site where, in the early 1800s, 283 people had worked 10 rice fields on the river.  They walked among the oaks. "This is hallowed ground," Martin said.

BALL RETURNED to his research. Reading over old slave ledgers, he came across two entries dated June 30, 1756, that would result in the most remarkable discovery of all.  On that day, Henry Laurens sold a group of children who had arrived on the slave ship Hare to his brother-in-law, Elias Ball Jr. Elias had named one of the children Priscilla.  "Through arduous reconstruction" of the family's genealogy, Ball was able to link Priscilla and her children to P. Henry Martin.  The Martin family tree was suddenly complete: from West Africa to Charleston, S.C.

Ball drove back to the Martins' two-story home and showed them their family tree, with the child Priscilla on one end and Thomas Martin and his children on the other.  The family, gathered in the living room, sat silent, wondering why slave traders would sell children.  Thomas' only daughter, Thomalind, 19, tried to take it all in.

Thomalind Martin Polite still remembers the day she learned who shewas and where she came from.  "I saw my roots," she says. "I saw my past." It was 1997 and she was home from college, visiting her family in Charleston, S.C., when a stranger dropped by to present her father with a chart of their family tree.

On that day, Thomalind learned that she was a direct descendant of a young girl stolen from the west coast of Africa, a slave bought by an ancestor of the man sitting in their living room.  The man was Edward Ball, a writer with a degree from Brown University, who had discovered Thomalind's past while searching through his family's papers. Ball's ancestors had owned nearly 4,000 slaves on 25 plantations on the Cooper River, not far from where Thomalind grew up.

The records -- old slave ledgers, letters and receipts -- showed that Elias Ball Jr. bought a 10-year-old girl in 1756. He named her Priscilla. She worked on the Comingtee plantation and died in 1811.  Ball was able to trace her children to a freed slave and Thomalind's father.  "He showed us all the documents and opened this big family tree and said, 'Here's Priscilla,' " remembers Thomalind.

Thomalind wasn't shocked. She knew she had probably descended from a slave. But her upbringing -- from early piano lessons to high school debutante -- was far removed from the legacy of slavery.  Her parents, Thomas and Rosalind, rarely talked about their ancestral past. What she knew about slavery came from school trips to plantations and half-remembered lectures.

In school, she recalls with a laugh, she "hated history."  But history was about to engulf her.  In l998, Ball's book, Slaves in the Family, came out. The story of the Martin family was in it. The book won the National Book Award for nonfiction, and Ball was invited to speak in Charleston. Thomalind's father died a month before the book was published; her mother placed a copy in the living room.

Thanks to Ball's research, Thomalind -- unlike other African Americans -- can trace her ancestors back to Sierra Leone. She knows the day Priscilla was taken from Africa. She knows the day on which Priscilla was sold, and for how much. She knows when she died. "What Ed Ball did was extraordinary," says Thomalind.

Not everyone was pleased.  Some Balls were unhappy that Edward had dredged up the family's slave-holding past.  And some of Thomalind's friends were upset.  "Several people told me, 'I wouldn't want a man to come to my door and tell me his family owned my family.' "

THOMALIND DIDN'T brood over the revelation.  She finished her studies for a master's degree in speech pathology and audiology at South Carolina State University, and moved home.  On June 19, 1999, she married her high school sweetheart, Antawn Polite. That same day, the newlyweds moved into a brick house in a comfortable neighborhood in North Charleston.  Two years later, they had a little girl and named her Faith.

Although Thomalind came from a family of teachers -- when her parents married in 1960, the headline in a local paper said "Charleston Teachers are Married" -- she wanted to do something else.  But her first job was as a speech therapist at a large elementary school of 500 mostly black and poor children. Attendance was so poor that the school gave bikes to students who came every day.

"You either love a school like Burns, or you run away," says Principal Bonnie Olsen.  Thomalind stayed.  In her windowless room, she taught children how to correctly pronounce words. She rarely thought about Priscilla.

BUT JOSEPH Opala could think of nothing else.  The anthropologist first heard about Thomalind's ancestral link to Priscilla when in 1997 he escorted Ball on a trip to Bunce Island, the British slave fort that, in the 1700s, sent thousands of Africans to Charleston and other ports. Opala, who had spent 17 years in Sierra Leone, had twice arranged for slave descendants to visit Africa, once in 1989 and again in 1997. Both trips were featured in documentary films.

But neither homecoming offered what Thomalind could: a direct and documented link to Sierra Leone.  Opala was at work on a third film. He wanted Thomalind to play a central role by returning to Sierra Leone.

SO YET AGAIN, a white stranger knocked on the door.  In his hand, Opala had an invitation from the Sierra Leone government asking Thomalind and her family to come home.  "We understand that Mr. Ball has linked your family to a distant ancestor, a little girl named 'Priscilla' who was sent aboard a slave ship from Sierra Leone to Charleston in June 1756," the letter began.  "We understand that Priscilla passed through Bunce Island, the notorious slave castle in Sierra Leone, before being put aboard the ship Hare.  "Thus, there is every reason to believe that your ancestor, Priscilla, came from our country, and that Sierra Leone is your ancestral home.  "Therefore, on behalf of the Government and people of Sierra Leone, I extend to you our warmest fraternal greetings, and our invitation for members of your family to come home."

Thomalind was stunned.  She worried about the African country, which had been torn apart by civil war. "I wasn't sure," she says. "I wasn't sure about the political climate, or war."  As a girl, she had been so sheltered that her parents had forbidden her to bike beyond Huger Street, the quiet palm-shaded lane where she grew up.

After a few minutes, she said yes.  She would go to West Africa,from where Priscilla had been kidnapped 250 years ago.

BUT HER story wasn't complete. There was yet another startling turn.  For years, Opala and Ball had assumed that the Hare, which brought Priscilla and 79 other slaves to America, was a British sloop, dispatched from Bunce Island.  Last August, while searching through slave records and letters in the New York Historical Society, Opala discovered that the Hare came from Newport and its owners were the well-to-do merchants William and Samuel Vernon.  Many of the letters had been written by the Hare's captain, Caleb Godfrey, to the Vernons, church-going brothers who had started trading in slaves and other goods years earlier.

The Vernon letters reflected their status: literate, elegant, penned in a steady hand. Godfrey's letters were crude, short, filled with misspelled words. There were so many slave ships going back and forth from Newport to Africa that Godfrey had little problem getting his letters delivered.

"I gasped," says Opala. "I was holding pieces of paper that were carried on that ship." Some of the letters, folded, contained wax seal stains and watermarks: the royal cipher, images of Britannia.  Opala also found an exchange of letters between the Vernons and the Charleston slave dealer Henry Laurens, who sold Priscilla to Elias Ball Jr., an in-law.  For Opala, Priscilla's story could now be told in a way that no other slave story could.

"It was a very rare discovery," he says. "The records Ed Ball found are amazing. But then to find the records of the slave ship that took that little girl to South Carolina . . . I was astonished. We can now track Priscilla's route from the day she left Africa to the day she was sold."  Opala thought it was important to get word of his findings to Newport. And he just happened to know someone who might help. In late 2003, Opala had met Valerie Tutson, a storyteller, at a black storytellers festival in Rhode Island.

Priscilla's story would make a great vehicle to tell the story of slavery in Rhode Island, he told her.  Tutson agreed and launched a grass-roots effort to raise money to send Thomalind to Africa and Newport, and to tell Priscilla's story. She called it "Project Priscilla: Bringing Rhode Islanders Together in an Act of Remembrance."

Contributing to the $10,000 goal is one way for Rhode Islanders to make up for the colony's role in the slave trade 250 years ago, she says. And tying slavery to the story of a little girl might make Newport's role in the slave trade easier to accept, she adds. "We can't do anything about the past, but we can write a new chapter."

No one can argue with the facts.  The Hare made one of the more than 900 voyages from Newport to Africa during the 1700s. About 100,000 Africans were shipped by Newport traders to other markets.  "Newport wasn't just another slave port in Rhode Island," Opala says. "It was the major slave port in America."

THE STORY of Priscilla hasn't needed a media blitz to begin to seep into the state's consciousness.  In Providence, artist Bob Dilworth is finishing an imaginary portrait of Priscilla. The painting will be given to the Sierra Leone National Museum.

At Narragansett High School, 10th-grade history students have written reflective papers on slavery based on Priscilla's story. "I was pretty shocked," 15-year-old Victoria Smurro said after making a presentation. "When you think of slavery, you think of the South. You don't think of New England or Rhode Island."

In Newport, historian Keith Stokes is providing a colonial context for the Priscilla story. The trade helped both Newport and Charleston develop into major ports, says Stokes, president of the Newport Chamber of Commerce. "This is an American story, about the building of an American economy. Our goal is not to just talk about this in February, during Black History Month."

IN DECEMBER, for the first time, Thomalind drove with a documentary filmmaker to the old Comingtee plantation on the Cooper River, less than an hour from her home.  Down a long, winding dirt road, the barren walls of the old mansion suddenly came into view. Trees grew from the dirt once covered by the home's wooden floor. Dead leaves covered the front steps.  A normally talkative Thomalind fell silent.

Facing the mansion ruins, she wondered: Did Priscilla walk here?  "It's a feeling I can't really describe," she says of that first encounter with her slave past.  On a second visit to the old Ball plantation, Thomalind offered her thoughts on slavery, a topic she once had been reluctant to explore.  "Slavery was a horrible thing. It's painful to think about what the slaves had to endure. But it's a part of history, and you cannot change it.  "You cannot be accountable for what your ancestors did. You have to look at it, and learn from it, and move on together."

As for her mid-May trip to Africa, Thomalind says she has no idea how she will feel when she arrives. But, she says, "I can make people aware and help people heal. Not just me, but others."  In Africa, preparations for her visit are under way. The people of Sierra Leone will greet her with plays, songs and food, Opala says.  Thomalind will visit Bunce Island, the old slave fort, and walk on the jetty where Priscilla may have seen her home for the last time.

Because the people of Sierra Leone believe their ancestors live on, they will welcome Thomalind as the lost spirit of a little girl torn from her homeland many years ago.  When Thomalind gets off the plane, they will chant, joyously, Pris-see-la, Pris-see-la, Pris-see-la.

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Most recent update of this page: 15 Aug. 2005

Africa image courtesy Barry's Clip Art. Written content & page design unless otherwise noted: Richard Jewell  Photos unless otherwise noted: © 2004-8 by Jeff Hall, Richard Jewell, other members of the Sierra Leone-Plymouth Partnership, or Foindu-Jokibu-Pujehun photographers.  First publication of Web site: 15 Aug. 2005.   Public Web address: http://www.SLPP.org.   Questions, suggestions, comments, & requests for site links: Contact Richard Jewell.

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