Redoshi
Redoshi | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1848 West Africa (present-day transatlantic slave trade |
Redoshi (c. 1848 – 1937) was a
Redoshi survived slavery and the imposition of
Biography
Redoshi lived in a village in West Africa in present day
Redoshi was transported on the Clotilda,[2] the last ship known to bring enslaved African people to North America. Its owners did so illegally, as more than 50 years earlier the U.S. had abolished the importation of slaves.[5] Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher had commissioned the captain and ship for a slave-buying mission to Ouidah, a port city in what is today Benin.[2]
After the ship reached Mobile, Mobile County, Alabama, where Meaher lived, Redoshi was sold with her husband to Washington Smith, a planter in Dallas County, Alabama,[2] about 15 miles (24 km) west of Selma. Smith was a wealthy man who owned a big plantation in Bogue Chitto. He also had a townhouse in Selma and was among the founders of the Bank of Selma.[6] He renamed her "Sally Smith" and put her to work in the fields and sometimes the big house.[3] Apparently, two of the Dahomey warriors who had kidnapped Redoshi and her kinfolk were also taken captive after boarding the ship to mock the captives and did not notice when it set sail until being told by Captain Foster that they too were going to be transported to America. They worked alongside Redoshi in the fields, and she never forgave them.[4]
After emancipation, Redoshi (aged 17)
Historiography
Seventy-two years ago a dark supple princess of the Tarkars, African Congo River Basin tribe, lived peacefully with her husband in the heart of the dark continent. She was 25 years old, strong and healthy, and imbued with the love of life in the jungles. Today this same princess, nearing the century mark in age, lives in a cabin on the Quarles plantation 18 miles from Selma.
"Survivor of Last Slave Cargo Lives on Plantation Near Selma"
Montgomery Advertiser, January 31, 1932
Scholar Hannah Durkin of
Durkin noted the limited number of sources that refer to the West African woman: notes and a letter by Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, not published during her lifetime; a Montgomery, Alabama, newspaper interview from 1932; a federal government educational film from 1938, in which she briefly appears; a brief account in the memoir of a civil-rights activist, and various data from the U.S. Census and other records. They are "fragmentary, frequently contradictory...[;] The gaps and inconsistencies across these materials help to underscore the inexpressibility of transatlantic slavery as a lived experience".[3]
In 1928, Hurston had written to her friend Langston Hughes about her travels in Alabama interviewing African Americans. She said that Lewis was not the only survivor of the Clotilda: she had also met a "most delightful" woman, "older than Cudjoe, about 200 miles up state on the Tombig[b]ee river". Hurston did not write further about Redoshi, but she included the name "Sally Smith" and biographical details in an appendix of her manuscript for what was posthumously published as Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States (2001). It was based on the manuscript and notes of about 500 of her interviews. Hurston did not refer to Redoshi in Barracoon, which concentrated on Kossola and his experiences.[3]
Redoshi, referred to as "Aunt Sally Smith", was interviewed in 1932 by the Montgomery Advertiser, when she was living on a plantation then owned by the Quarles family.[10] The article reported that she was 25 when she was captured, that she was a "princess" from the tribe of the Tarkars,[10][11] and that she came from the same village in present-day Benin as Kossola/Cudjo Lewis. Durkin says this is "apparently the only newspaper article that is devoted to the experiences of a female Middle Passage survivor". The account, she says, is mediated by the white journalist and "reflects its white interviewer's romantic fantasies of the African continent" and "reinforces the customary pre-civil-rights era depictions of U.S. slavery as a benevolent, 'civilising' practice".[3]
Redoshi was filmed for a 1938 educational film,
Civil-rights activist Amelia Boynton Robinson of Alabama said in her 1979 memoir Bridge across Jordan that she had met "Aunt Sally" in about 1936. Boynton Robinson later organized voter registration and other grassroots efforts there in the early 1960s. She noted that Smith had come from Africa and that they talked about her retention of African cultural traditions within her family.[3] Historian Alston Fitts included a short biography of Redoshi in Selma: A Bicentennial (1989, rep. in 2017), which was based on "Quarles family tradition" and on the account in Robinson's book.[4]
See also
References
- ^ Coughlan, Sean (2020-03-25). "Last survivor of transatlantic slave trade discovered". BBC News. Retrieved 2020-03-25.
- ^ a b c d e Daley, Jason (April 5, 2019). "Researcher Identifies the Last Living Survivor of the Transatlantic Slave Trade". Smithsonian. Retrieved April 8, 2019.
- ^ S2CID 150975893.
- ^ ISBN 9780817319328.
- ^ Daley, Jason (January 24, 2019). "Search Continues for Last American Slave Ship After Recent Wreck Ruled Out". Smithsonian. Retrieved April 8, 2019.
- ^ ISBN 9780822372233.
- History. Retrieved 2019-05-12.
- ^ Garcia, Sandra E. (April 3, 2019). "She Survived a Slave Ship, the Civil War and the Depression. Her Name Was Redoshi". The New York Times. Retrieved April 10, 2019.
- ^ "Last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade identified", Press release, Newcastle University, 2 April 2019
- ^ Newspapers.com.
- ^ Sylviane A. Diouf believes that the term "Tarkar" might have come from a misunderstanding of the name of a local king, or the name of a town. Diouf, Sylviane A. (2007). Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. New York: Oxford UP. p. 40.
- ISBN 9781441172938.
External links
- Media related to Redoshi at Wikimedia Commons