In First Lady Michelle Obama’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery

The New York Times article, "In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery, " by Rachel L. Swarns and Jodi Kantor, reports: "In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475."

In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Mrs. Obama grew up with only a vague sense of her ancestry, aides and relatives said. During the presidential campaign, the family learned about one paternal great-great-grandfather, a former slave from South Carolina, but the rest of Mrs. Obama’s roots were a mystery.

Now the more complete map of Mrs. Obama’s ancestors — including the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields — for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency.

The findings — uncovered by Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist, and The New York Times — substantiate what Mrs. Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear.

While President Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives, the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors, when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”

The outlines of Mrs. Obama’s family history unfolded from 19th century probate records, yellowing marriage licenses, fading photographs and the recollections of elderly women who remember the family. Ms. Smolenyak, who has traced the ancestry of many prominent figures, began studying the first lady’s roots in earnest after conducting some preliminary research into Mrs. Obama’s ancestry for an article published in The New York Times earlier this year.

Of the dozens of relatives she identified, Ms. Smolenyak said, it was the slave girl who seemed to call out most clearly.

“Out of all Michelle’s roots, it’s Melvinia who is screaming to be found,” she said.

When her owner, David Patterson, died in 1852, Melvinia soon found herself on a 200-acre farm with new masters, Mr. Patterson’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. It was a strange and unfamiliar world.

In South Carolina, she had lived on an estate with 21 slaves. In Georgia, she was one of only three slaves on property that is now part of a neat subdivision in Rex, near Atlanta.

Whether Melvinia labored in the house or in the fields, there was no shortage of work: wheat, corn, sweet potatoes and cotton to plant and harvest, and 3 horses, 5 cows, 17 pigs and 20 sheep to care for, according to an 1860 agricultural survey.

It is difficult to say who might have impregnated Melvinia, who gave birth to Dolphus around 1859, when she was perhaps as young as 15. At the time, Henry Shields was in his late 40s and had four sons ages 19 to 24, but other men may have spent time on the farm.

“No one should be surprised anymore to hear about the number of rapes and the amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery; it was an everyday experience, “ said Jason A. Gillmer, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and slaves. “But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex.”

In 1870, three of Melvinia’s four children, including Dolphus, were listed on the census as mulatto. One was born four years after emancipation, suggesting that the liaison that produced those children endured after slavery. She gave her children the Shields name, which may have hinted at their paternity or simply been the custom of former slaves taking their master’s surnames.

Even after she was freed, Melvinia stayed put, working as a farm laborer on land adjacent to that of Charles Shields, one of Henry’s sons.

But sometime in her 30s or 40s, census records show, Melvinia broke away and managed to reunite with former slaves from her childhood on the Patterson estate: Mariah and Bolus Easley, who settled with Melvinia in Bartow County, near the Alabama border. Dolphus married one of the Easleys’ daughters, Alice, who is Mrs. Obama’s great-great-grandmother.

A community “that had been ripped apart was somehow pulling itself back together,” Ms. Smolenyak said of the group in Bartow County.

Still, Melvinia appears to have lived with the unresolved legacy of her childhood in slavery until the very end. Her 1938 death certificate, signed by a relative, says “don’t know” in the space for the names of her parents, suggesting that Melvinia, then in her 90s, may never have known herself.

Sometime before 1888, Dolphus and Alice Shields continued the migration, heading to Birmingham, a boomtown with a rumbling railroad, an iron and steel industry and factories that attracted former slaves and their children from across the South.

Dolphus Shields was in his 30s and very light skinned — some say he looked like a white man — a church-going carpenter who could read, write and advance in an industrializing town. By 1900, he owned his own home, census records show. By 1911, he had opened his own carpentry and tool sharpening business.

A co-founder of First Ebenezer Baptist Church and Trinity Baptist Church, which later became active in the civil rights movement, he supervised Sunday schools at both churches, which still exist today, and at Regular Missionary Baptist Church.

“He was the dean of the deacons in Birmingham,” said Helen Heath, 88, who attended church with him. “He was a serious man. He was about business.”

He carried his family into the working-class, moving into a segregated neighborhood of striving black homeowners and renters. In his home, there was no smoking, no cursing, no gum chewing, no lipstick or trousers for ladies and absolutely no blues on the radio, which was reserved for hymns, remembered Bobbie Holt, 73, who was raised by Mr. Shields and his fourth wife, Lucy. She said the family went to church “every night of the week, it seemed like.”

He carried peppermints for neighborhood children, Mrs. Holt said, and told funny stories about his escapades as a boy. But his family struggled.

His first wife, Alice Easley Shields, moved around after they split up, working as a seamstress and a maid, and two of their sons stumbled.

Robert Lee Shields, Mrs. Obama’s great-grandfather, married Annie Lawson in 1906 and worked as a laborer and a railroad porter but disappeared from the public record sometime around his 32nd birthday.

Willie Arthur Shields, an inventor who obtained patents for improving dry cleaning operations, ended up working as a maintenance man, Mrs. Holt said.

As for his ancestry, Dolphus Shields didn’t talk about it.

“We got to the place where we didn’t want anybody to know we knew slaves; people didn’t want to talk about that,” said Mrs. Heath, who said she assumed he had white relatives because his skin color and hair texture “told you he had to be near white.”

At a time when blacks despaired at the intransigence and violence of whites who barred them from voting, from most city jobs, from whites-only restaurants and from owning property in white neighborhoods, Dolphus Shields served as a rare link between the deeply divided communities.

His carpentry shop stood in the white section of town, and he mixed easily and often with whites. “They would come to his shop and sit and talk,” Mrs. Holt said.

Dolphus Shields firmly believed race relations would improve. “It’s going to come together one day,” he often said, Mrs. Holt recalled.

By the time he died in 1950 at age 91, change was on the way. On June 9, 1950, the day that his obituary appeared on the front page of The Birmingham World, the black newspaper also ran a banner headline that read, “U.S. Court Bans Segregation in Diners and Higher Education.” The Supreme Court had outlawed separate but equal accommodations on railway cars and in universities in Texas and Oklahoma.

Up North, his grandson, a painter named Purnell Shields, Mrs. Obama’s grandfather, was positioning his family to seize the widening opportunities in Chicago.

But as his descendants moved forward, they lost touch with the past. Today, Dolphus Shields lies in a neglected black cemetery, where patches of grass grow knee-high and many tombstones have toppled.

Mrs. Holt, a retired nursing assistant, said he came to her in a dream last month. She dug up his photograph, never guessing that she would soon learn that Dolphus Shields was a great-great-grandfather of the first lady.

“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Holt, gasping at the news. “I always looked up to him, but I would never have imagined something like this. Praise God, we’ve come a long way.”

(source: New York Times. Jim Sherling contributed reporting from Rex, Ga. Kitty Bennett contributed research.)

Bunce Island Slave Post

Bance Island in Sierra Leone

Between about 1750 and 1800, Bance Island was one of the major slave trading operations on the Rice Coast of West Africa. Bance Island (now Bunce) is located in the Sierra Leone River about twenty miles above modern Freetown. It is a small island, only one-third of a mile long and uninhabited today, but in the days of the Atlantic slave trade it was an economically strategic point. Because Bance Island was at the limit of navigability for ocean-going vessels, it was the natural meeting place for European slave traders arriving in large sailing ships and African traders following the rivers down from the interior. As early as 1672 the Royal African Company of England established a commercial fort on Bance Island, but that company was poorly managed and abandoned its operation. (source: Yale)

Map of Sierra Leone

Then, about 1750, the London firm of Grant, Sargent, and Oswald took control of Bance Island and made it into a commercial success. The London partners rebuilt the fort, established a shipyard, assembled a fleet of small vessels to cruise the Rice Coast in search of slaves, and expanded the African work force. They also concentrated heavily on supplying slaves to one particular market—Charlestown, South Carolina where local rice planters were eager to purchase slaves from Sierra Leone and the neighboring areas. (source: Yale)

The remains of the Bunce Island jetty where thousands of slaves began their horrific journey to the southern American states, where plantation owners paid high prices for slaves from the region (BBC)

Richard Oswald was the principal partner in the London firm that operated Bance Island. About 1756, Oswald established a close personal and business relationship with Henry Laurens, one of the wealthiest rice planters and slave dealers in the Colony of South Carolina. As Laurens' papers have been preserved by the South Carolina Historical Society (and recently published), we can reconstruct the complicated business arrangements between these two men. Oswald's agents at Bance island dispatched several ships a year to Charlestown, each containing between 250 and 350 slaves and goods such as ivory and camwood (a red dyewood). (source: Yale)

Cannons defended the island against outside attack. Bunce Island was attacked twice by pirates and four times by the French when it was a going concern. (BBC)

Laurens advertised the slaves, then sold them at auction to local rice planters for a ten percent commission. He used the substantial earnings from the sale to buy locally produced Carolina rice which he sent to Oswald in London, together with the ivory and camwood, and often in the same ship that brought the slaves from Africa. If Oswald's ship were headed directly back to Sierra Leone, Laurens sometimes loaded ship building supplies such as masts, spars and plank-the products of South Carolina's forest industry. At times, the wealthy Laurens sent his own ship directly from Charlestown to Bance Island to obtain Sierra Leonean slaves for his expansive rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. In a letter to Oswald, Henry Laurens once noted that slaves from Bance Island were "as advantageous as any" imported into South Carolina. (source: Yale)

Six forts were built on the site during its time as a major regional trading post. (BBC)

The profitable slave trade connection between Oswald and Laurens—between Sierra Leone and South Carolina—was significant enough to affect the course of American history. During the Revolutionary War Henry Laurens served as President of the Continental Congress (the provisional government) and was later appointed American envoy to Holland. Laurens was captured en route to his post by the British Navy and imprisoned in the Tower of London on a charge of high treason—the highest ranking American official ever captured during the Revolutionary War. Richard Oswald posted bail for his American business partner; and Laurens remained in London until the conclusion of the War, when he was freed in exchange for the British commander in North America. (source: Yale)

After the British Abolition Act of 1807, Bunce Island was used as a saw mill and trading post.(BBC)

Laurens was then appointed as one of the four American Peace Commissioners who negotiated United States independence under the Treaty of Paris. But, amazingly, it was Richard Oswald who was named to head the British negotiating team, no doubt, because of his American business contacts and friendship with Laurens. United States independence was, thus, negotiated, at least in part, between a British slave trader with operations in Sierra Leone and his agent for rice-growing slaves in South Carolina. The slave trade connection, based on rice, had helped to boost both men into positions of wealth and international prominence. (source: Yale)

Slaves held on the island awaiting transportation to the Americas were kept in cramped underground dungeons. (BBC)

Laurens was then appointed as one of the four American Peace Commissioners who negotiated United States independence under the Treaty of Paris. But, amazingly, it was Richard Oswald who was named to head the British negotiating team, no doubt, because of his American business contacts and friendship with Laurens. United States independence was, thus, negotiated, at least in part, between a British slave trader with operations in Sierra Leone and his agent for rice-growing slaves in South Carolina. The slave trade connection, based on rice, had helped to boost both men into positions of wealth and international prominence. (source: Yale)

Some slaves didn't survive captivity long enough to make the crossing and were buried on the island.(BBC)

Some of the traders also met their end on the island, British firms like the Royal Africa Company operated here from about 1670. (BBC)

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.

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.