Cottman - Shackles from the deep: tracing the path of a sunken slave ship, a bitter past, and a rich legacy

by Geoffrey Canada president of the Harlem Childrens Zone

THESE DAYS, when people talk about slavery in the United States, they think of it as ancient history, but for me its not so distant. Thats because I have spoken face-to-face with a slave, my great-grandmother.

She was born just a couple of years before the Emancipation Proclamation, so while she grew up free, she was born into slavery. I only learned about it years after her death, and I was stunned. Suddenly slavery was very real to me. Then something else happened and made me realize slavery is a legacy thats part of who I am today.

For a segment on the PBS television show Finding Your Roots, historian and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his staff did a thorough search of my genetic makeup and my family history. My father had left our family when I was very young, so I had a lot of unanswered questions about my last name and genealogy. Like the characters in the comic books I loved as a young boy, I also wanted to know my origin story, to learn what I was made of, what slice of the African-American experience I read about in school was my own. What Gates uncovered was astounding to me.

The researchers dug into old records to see where my fathers surname and family had come from. After some twists and turns, they were finally able to trace the family back to the slave operations of a rural plantation in Virginia run by the Cannady family.

I traveled with Gates to the area where my ancestors were held as slaves. It was disturbing to think of my own flesh and blood living there, people like my great-grandmother, unable to read or write or even know where they were in this strange foreign place. As I walked through the land, surrounded by hills and hearing dogs barking in the distance, I felt in my gut how trapped and frightened my ancestors might have felt there. Even though I now know where my ancestors lived during slavery, I still have so many questions: How long were they there? How were they treated? Did they sail across the Atlantic on a ship like the Henrietta Marie? Sadly that ancestry is untraceable for so many African Americans, who lost their history along with their freedom and dignity.

For me, discovering my own family story highlighted the closeness of historyand that our collective history helps shape us into who we are today.

The Emancipation Proclamation ended the practice of slavery more than 150 years ago, but the tragic legacy of those prior decades continues to cast a long shadow over our present.

Like author Michael Cottman, and the intrepid treasure hunters and marine archaeologists unearthing the wreck of the Henrietta Marie under the sea, its critical for all of us to investigate the pastto learn what ground we stand on as we step forward into the future.

T IMELINE OF THE H ENRIETTA M ARIE