ACT I: VIRGINIA — The Year the Counting Begins

■ ACT I: VIRGINIA • JAMESTOWNETOJAMESTOWNE.COM • jamestownetojamestowne.com

Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana

1619 is not the beginning of African presence in North America. Africans had been present in Spanish colonial territories since the sixteenth century — as soldiers, as enslaved people, as explorers. Juan Garrido, a free African man, participated in the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1510s. Africans were present in what is now South Carolina and Florida before the English settled Jamestown at all.

But 1619 is the beginning of the specific system — the British colonial system of race-based chattel slavery — that would define the country that eventually became the United States of America. It is the beginning of the counting. Not the beginning of the story, but the beginning of the particular chapter of the story that produced the conditions in which I arrived in 2011.

When I came to Virginia, I came to a place that was already four hundred years deep. The roads I drove on, the neighborhoods I lived in, the institutions I navigated — all of them were built on top of those four hundred years. I did not know this in the way I know it now. I knew it abstractly, in the way that someone who has read history knows it. I did not know it in the body, which is the only way it finally makes sense.

The year 1619 matters because it establishes a before and an after. Before 1619, the Africans in Virginia existed in a legal gray area — some were treated as indentured servants, some acquired land, some even held other people in servitude. After 1619, and more precisely after the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, the category was fixed: Black meant enslaved, and enslaved was permanent and hereditary. The law closed a door that had been open. The counting of everything that followed begins here.

I am standing at the beginning of the count, trying to understand what it means to have arrived voluntarily in the same place where the involuntary arrival was recorded four centuries ago.

About This Journey

jamestownetojamestowne.com

Jamestowne to Jamestowne

Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana

Both places are named for the same man.

This project reverses a historical direction of travel and asks what becomes visible when the Atlantic is crossed knowingly, not abstractly.

Essays

1 published

01	ACT I: VIRGINIA — Point Comfort, Virginia

jamestownetojamestowne.com — Gabriel Mahia

ACT I: VIRGINIA — Point Comfort, Virginia

■ ACT I: VIRGINIA • JAMESTOWNETOJAMESTOWNE.COM • jamestownetojamestowne.com

Jamestown, Virginia, USA → James Fort, Accra, Ghana

There is a place called Point Comfort at the mouth of the James River in Virginia. In August 1619, a ship arrived there carrying twenty and odd Africans who had been seized from a Portuguese slave vessel in the Atlantic. They were sold to English colonists in exchange for food and supplies. The transaction was recorded. The names of the Africans were not.

I am an African. I am a Kenyan who came to Virginia in 2011, nearly four centuries after those first arrivals. I did not come on a ship. I came on a flight, with a passport, with paperwork that the country had agreed to honor. The conditions were different in every material sense. The geography was the same.

The reverse crossing is this: to travel from Jamestown, Virginia — the place where the African presence in what became the United States begins — to James Fort in Accra, Ghana, which is one of the departure points from which enslaved Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. To make the journey in the direction they were taken from. To arrive at the place they left. To complete, voluntarily and in full consciousness, the circuit that was broken in the seventeenth century.

This project began with a question I could not answer easily: what does it mean to be an African who came to America willingly, who served in its military, who built a life in its suburbs, who used its food pantries and bought his first car from a Honda dealership in Manassas, and who now lives in Nairobi — what does it mean to stand at Point Comfort and look at the water from which that history came?

I do not have the answer. I have the journey. This series of twenty-four essays, written over six years, is the attempt to find out what the answer is by making the crossing and recording what it shows me. The first act is Virginia. I am starting at the arrival point because the arrival point is where I am.