Randy J. Sparks’ Africans in the Old South is as much a prosopography of native Africans living in the American South between 1760 and 1840 as it is a reflection on the nature of the archive. Using the tools of microhistory, Sparks painstakingly reconstructs the “life narratives” of a diverse group of native Africans who travelled—both by choice and by force—to the American South (8). This biographical approach, Sparks argues, is an “important corrective to quantitative studies of the slave trade that have largely ignored the lives of individuals” (3–4). By highlighting individuals—and how they navigated social, economic, and legal circumstances—Sparks reveals the diversity and complexity of the African experience.
Each of the six chapters draws on an array of archival sources to tell the story of an individual or group. Some parts of the book, such as Chapter 1 about Elizabeth Cleveland Hardcastle and her niece Catherine Cleveland, are brimming with narrative. Both women freely immigrated to South Carolina in 1764. Elizabeth, the Anglo-African daughter of a slave-trading family, purchased a 750-acre rice plantation and married an Englishman, integrating herself into the slaveholding gentry. Following her death, however, her mixed-race background prolonged an already long estate settlement. Meanwhile, Catherine, also mixed-raced, became a member of the free black community and eventually the head of a large household. Details about their lives, garnered from the legal documents generated by Elizabeth’s estate settlement, demonstrate the complicated entanglements of race, class, and gender in the Carolina Lowcountry.
Other chapters are less comprehensive. Indeed, rather than omitting the stories of Africans with sparse archival records, Sparks includes them—silences, unverifiable claims, and all—and meditates on what we can and cannot know about the people featured in them. In this sense, Africans in the Old South might be read alongside Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives, published less than two months later. Both consider the role of the archive in reconstructing the lives of subalterns.
Sparks’ shortest chapter, Chapter 5, is a mere ten pages long and traces the repeated escapes of three unnamed Africans. After fleeing a Caribbean plantation by canoe, the men were picked up by a vessel heading to Mobile, Alabama in 1829. Once in the United States, they were jailed while officials debated their legal status. (Since they spoke no European language, people believed that they were newly-imported victims of the illegal slave trade.) They escaped, only to be re-incarcerated in Jackson, Mississippi. In Jackson, they were sold as slaves but escaped once more, just to be jailed again in Baton Rouge. The British consul in Mobile, who traced their movements through local newspapers, eventually contacted the U.S. District Attorney for Louisiana. He demanded that the men returned to Mobile, where they were placed on the first ship bound to Liverpool. In England, officials determined that the men were from Old Calabar and arranged for their return. The vessel arrived in Fernando Po, an island located in the Bight of Biafra. From there, their stories go silent.
The remaining four chapters examine an equally diverse group of Africans. Chapter 2 chronicles the Anglo-African Holman family who immigrated to South Carolina decades after the Clevelands. This slaveholding family allied themselves with fellow mixed-race families and free people of colour, further demonstrating the breadth of experiences endured by mixed-race Africans in the American South. The next chapter chronicles the life of Robert Johnson. Johnson was kidnapped as a child, enslaved as a manservant in Georgia, and relocated to Rhode Island where he negotiated his eventual freedom. By the 1830s, Johnson was not only an active member of Boston’s abolitionist community—giving speeches and interviews about his enslavement—but also a physician. Chapter 4 considers the veracity of a Dimmock Charlton’s life narrative, an African who traversed three continents in his shifting identities as a slave, mariner, and freeman. Lastly, Chapter 6 follows Charles Smith. While detained on a plantation in Alabama, Smith claimed to have met Sack N’Jaie, a Sierra Leone sailor illegally enslaved. Upon Smith’s release, he returned to Africa to locate Sack N’Jaie’s family. At that point, the story falls apart, as British authorities began investigating Smith’s story as well as Sack N’Jaie’s whereabouts.
While many prosopographies aim to reveal commonalities between individuals, this book does the opposite; it highlights the diversity of experience that Africans endured as their lived and laboured in the American South. If anything ties their stories together, it is their mobility—what Sparks refers to as “life geographies” (10). The chapters take readers across regions and continents, along borders, and through empires and nations. In doing so, Sparks emphasizes how this movement was a “significant factor in shaping identity, relationships, and opportunities” (10). Often this mobility was geographical, as evidenced by the maps that trace individual and group travels at the beginning of every chapter. Other times this mobility was social or racial. Sparks’ subjects demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of how to manoeuvre the social, economic, and legal worlds of the American South and the greater Atlantic world. That adaptability served them well and, in many ways, upends portrayals of enslaved Africans as provincial. Beyond their shared mobility, the lived experiences of these individuals differ vastly. By uncovering these differences, Africans in the Old South explores the tensions of the African experience; the fluidity and rigidity of race; the tenuousness of freedom; the persistence of links between Africa and the U.S. South even after 1808; and the value of biography in the history of the black Atlantic.
