Black History In America: Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mt. Pleasant, SC

Boone Plantation Slave Cabin

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mt. Pleasant, SC is proud to introduce a new groundbreaking addition to the Boone Hall experience. Visitors can now take a journey through our exciting new exhibit, "Black History In America."

Boone Plantation Slave Cabin

What really makes this exhibit unique is that this story will be told using eight of the original slave cabins located on Boone Hall Plantation. Each of the cabins on Slave Street present different themes in telling the black history story. Visitors are able to see the different aspects of daily life, how they worked and lived, struggles that were faced, as well as follow different periods of historical progression from the beginning all the way up to present day.

Boone Plantation Slave Cabin

Life size figures, pre-recorded narratives, audiovisual presentations, photos, pictures, biographical information, and actual historical relics, are interwoven and meshed together in displays throughout the cabins presenting this new exhibit.

Boone Plantation Slave Cabins

Themes for each cabin are as follows:

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mt. Pleasant, SC

Cabin 1 – Praise House
Cabin 2 – Slave Crafts
Cabin 3 – Their Life & Family
Cabin 4 – Archaeological Discoveries
Cabin 5 – Their Work and Life
Cabin 6 – Emancipation & Freedom
Cabin 7 – Struggle For Civil Rights
Cabin 8 – Heroes and Leaders

(http://boonehallplantation.com/beyond.php)

Boone Plantation Slave Cabin

The next part of our journey will take us past the original slave cabins along “the row of oaks,” as the driveway is referred to. For some people this part of the Boone Hall Plantation is their least favorite.

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mt. Pleasant, SC

As you approach the slave cabins you start to feel a sense of remorse that is, of course, unfounded. Nonetheless, you realize at this point that slavery was real in all its profound evil. As you peer into the blank windows of the cabins you see the meager living endured by thousands of slaves throughout time until abolishment.

Boone Plantation Slave Cabin

From the front door, to the right is usually the bed area, straight ahead is where food was often prepared and eaten, and finally off to the left is a small play or study area for the children. Along the way you come to some people that artistically recreate a craft originally brought over from Africa. That craft is basket weaving, which is very popular with the locals.

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina

From the beginning all the way to the end of your tour, you will feel like you stepped into the past. You see what you might have done back then, in your mind. How life might have been, whether you would have liked to have been alive then, how the food would taste, all these things course through your mind like the Ashley River runs through the property. Sadness creeps up on you as you prepare to leave. As you turn back on the road leading away from the house, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will return. (source: Hubpages)

Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mt. Pleasant, SC

Boone Hall Plantation: Gullah Story About the Adam's Apple

Boone Hall Plantation in Mount Pleasant (boonehallplantation.com) has a walking tour of its slave cabin lane featuring different stories told in each of eight cabins – from the praise house churches, to the variety of jobs done by slaves, to the changed roles after emancipation, to the more recent struggle for civil rights. Boone Hall also puts on a live Gullah Theater presentation, celebrating the unique culture created by the slaves and their descendants along the sea islands.

Read more: The State

Boone Hall Plantation: Gullah Story About the Adam's Apple

Priscillia A Slave Story, Part 3

She was stolen from Africa. And brought to America, in a ship owned by Rhode Island merchants. Her story is 1 in 11 million. That's because -- unlike the others -- it can be told. Two scholars and a group of Rhode Island artists have completed the circle of her life.

Priscilla? No, but this young Sierra Leone woman selling charcoal from a hand-woven basket on her head looks as though she could be a distant cousin of Mrs. Thomalind Martin Polite. Look at the way she smiles as she crinkles her nose. The images of Mrs. Thomalind smiling bear a striking similarity to this native of Sierra Leone.

This is the third part of "Priscilla's Story,"in the Providence Journal, on Feb. 15, 2005, by Paul Davis. You can find part2 posted here, or visit the Providence Journal for the complete story:

Thomalind Martin Polite still remembers the day she learned who she was 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.

Edward Ball with Carolyn Smalls Goodson (1997)

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.

Elias Ball

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.

Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family"

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.

Instead, she took a job 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.

Joseph Opala at Bunce Island (Sierra Leone, Africa 1988)

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.

Joseph Opala Greets Thomalind Martin Polite, Lungi Airport

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.

Slave Castle at Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, Africa

"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.

From the Rhode Island Historical Society Postal History Collection:

1766 Stampless Folded Letter from Alexander Willock - Island of Antigua

To Samuel & William Vernon, Merchants - Newport, Rhode Island

"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.

Charleston slave dealer Henry Laurens, Second President of the Continental Congress

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.

Charles Kuralt's America: South Carolina Low Country

Charles Kuralt's - "America": 7/9/2010

"'John C. KILL-hoon,' that's what we call old John."

I was in the company of Alphonso Brown, band director at Rivers Middle School, black historian and speaker of Gullah, the rich black patois of the Carolina Low Country.

"KILL-hoon": John C. Calhoun asserted that slavery was a "positive good." He rooted this claim on two grounds: white supremacy and paternalism. All societies, Calhoun claimed, are ruled by an elite group which enjoys the fruits of the labor of a less-privileged group.

"White people remember history here, " Alphonso said. "Well, we remember it, too. He was KILL-hoon back then, and he'll be KILL-hoon a hundred years from now." Alphonso told me that as a statue, Calhoun used to be at ground level, but he was so regularly vandalized by black Charlestonians that the Daughters of the Confederacy had to put him up in the sky out of reach. Alphonso chuckled to think about it.

From Alphonso Brown, you get a little different perspective on Charleston history. Down at the Battery, gesturing toward Sullivan's Island in the harbor, he said, "That was our Ellis Island. Slaves from Africa spent two weeks in quarantine in the Sullivan's Island pesthouse. Then they were brought into the customs house and sold.

Alphonso on the Reconstruction years: "The freed slaves were promised forty acres and a mule. Some got twenty acres, and a mule. Some got twenty acres and no mule. Some got a mule and no acres. Most got nothing. Life was hard for everybody."

Alphonso on the sweetgrass basket sellers in their bonnets and long dresses: "They dress poor but they live rich. Those women make a lot of money. One of them has a husband who comes to collect her at the end of the day in a big Mercedes-Benz."

Alphonso on Low Country speech: "The linguist say Gullah is a dying language. Ain't nothing dyin' about Gullah. Just last night, I heard a woman say, 'Dat food cookin' smells' good mak' my jaw leak.' " He said this so fast and musically that he had to repeat it a couple times before I could understand it. He laughed, "You ain't necessarily supposed to understand it, "he said. Alphonso on black craftsmen: "Nearly everything you see around here was built by blacks - the houses, the walls, the streets and sidewalks - and not just by slaves, either. In 1850, there were thousands of free black artisans and business people in Charleston."

Or, as he put it in a guide he wrote to Gullah Charleston: "Dem cyaapentas, boat mekkah, cook, iyon wukkah, net mekkah, en pleny mo', is wu'k dat de Black people bin doin' ya fuh shree hunnad odd yea'…Roll unuh eye 'bout! Yenna ain't kno' who mek dese place ya? De Black han', dat who!"

South Carolina Blacksmith, Philip Simmons

At least one celebrated blacksmith is still around, Philip Simmons. "If you see a beautiful iron gate with meticulous curves, "Alphonso Brown said, "it was made by one of the master blacksmiths of two hundred years ago - or it was made by Philip Simmons." We went to see some Philip Simmons gates - a valentine gate he made for his church, St. John's for that is where he says his heart is; an egret gate at 2 St. Michael's Alley; a snake gate at 329 East Bay, once the house of Christopher Gadsden, who designed the Revolutionary War serpent flag with the legend "Don't Tread On Me."

Then we went to see Philip Simmons. He is a kindly man of eighty-two whose forge is in a ramshackle tin building behind his house on Blake Street. It doesn't look like the workshop of a National Treasure, but that's what Mr. Simmons is, officially certified by the Smithsonian Institution.

I asked him how he got started.

"When I was thirteen, "he said, "I used to stand in the door of the blacksmith shop and see the red-hot fire and see the sparks flying, and I liked that. The blacksmith let me help out, hold the horse while he was putting the shoe on, turn the hand forge, clean up the shop. After a while, he learned me names of everything. If he said, "boy, hand me that three-inch swage,' I had to know what he wanted. I learned that way.

"There were blacksmiths all over Charleston. I had many competitors. I was shoeing horses and fixing wagons, but people kept coming to tell me this company was going to trucks, that company was going to trucks, ho more horses, no more wagons, blacksmiths going out of business, see? I had to start studying what I was going to do." He turned to gates and fences and window guards.

Philip Simmons Heart Fence. Charleston, SC

"I've made more than two hundred gates and other ornamental iron works since then. Made gates for the Smithsonian in Washington and South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, and this Charleston Visitor Center down here. The doctor says don't do any heavy work, but I may make some more gates yet. You know who my competitor is now?"

He gave me a soft smile.

"Father time," he said.

There is an old saying among blacksmiths that the two ways a blacksmith can go to hell are by hammering cold iron and not charging enough. It appeared to me from his modest living conditions that Mr. Simmons hadn't charged enough

"Well, I put my children through school, "he said. "I gave money to my church. I have everything I want. And I am rich in friends."

After we said goodbye to Mr. Simmons and headed back downtown, Alphonso Brown said, "Some of these homeowners leave Charleston sometimes. I have noticed one thing. When they leave, they take their Philip Simmons gates with them.

Gullah of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

The Gullah/Geechee people are descendants of enslaved Africans from various ethnic groups of west and central Africa. Brought to the New World and forced to work on the plantations of coastal South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, Gullah/Geechee people have retained many aspects of their African heritage due to the geographic barriers of the coastal landscape and the strong sense of place and family of Gullah/Geechee community members.

Today, the cultural and linguistic umbrella of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor extends from Wilmington, NC to Jacksonville, FL. People who identify as Gullah or Geechee represent the many ways that Africans in the Americas have held on to and amalgamated the traditions of Africa with the cultures they encountered both during and after enslavement.

Gullah of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina


See also:
Low Country Sweet Grass Basket Weaving
Charles Kuralt's America: South Carolina Low Country
Gullah Grub

Gullah Grub

Cooking, “Gullah Style”

Gullah Chef Bill Green

The Gullah people are African Americans who live in the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullah are known for preserving more of their African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African American community in the United States. The Gullah dialect is rooted in West and Central Africa, combined with English and other languages such as French.

To understand the Gullah way of cooking, imagine growing up in a beautiful sun bathed island community where everyone farmed, fished and raised their own livestock in a natural, serene setting. Without access to mass transportation or expensive imports, families only ate local and in season.

Most foods are stewed, grilled or roasted, very little is fried. Free range chickens give fresh eggs and wholesome meat, grass fed goats give the tenderest of lean meat. Whole grains such as rice and cornbread balance out the nutritional profile of many meals. (Gullah Grub)

The Gullah Seasonal Diet

Summer is for feasting and large gatherings with family and friends. The earth and sea gives forth her bounty of fruits, vegetables, and seafood.

Fall brings dark green vegetables that are loaded with antioxidants and have remarkable cleansing properties which boosts the immune system and ready the body for the winter.

Winter is great for stews of mostly vegetables and beans with some cured meat for extra protein. Fatty fish and shellfish provide an Omega3 rich diet.

Spring ushers in the cycle of earth and sea again, producing high energy, low calorie food to ready your body for activities in the warm sun.

This is Gullah living. This is Gullah cooking. This is the philosophy of the Gullah Grub Restaurant and Catering, LLC. (source: Gullah Grub Restaurant)

The Gullah Grub Restaurant

Priscillia A Slave Story, Part 2

Part two: She was stolen from Africa. And brought to America, in a ship owned by Rhode Island merchants. Her story is 1 in 11 million. That's because -- unlike the others -- it can be told. Two scholars and a group of Rhode Island artists have completed the circle of her life. From The Providence Journal, 14 Feb. 2005, by Paul Davis, Journal Staff Writer

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 importantly, 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 official, in a welcoming speech. "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 later. "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 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 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 childen 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.

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A three-part series by Providence Journal staff writer Paul Davis

She was stolen from Africa. And brought to America in a ship owned by prominent Rhode Island merchants. Her story is 1 in 11 million. Unlike so many others, it can be told. Two scholars from Brown, and Yale, along with a group of Rhode Island artists have completed the circle of her life.