Togo is a narrow country sandwiched between the West African nations of Ghana and Benin. It was afflicted by the slave trade. The population fled inland. Today, some of their descendents sell fish beside the shore of a vast lake while making their homes on an island where their forebears hide from slavers. Art Wolfe, Photographer

The photo caught my eye, sure, when I came across it at This is Africa, an excellent new tumblr site that works to present more than a single story of Africa. But just the sight of the country name, Togo, invokes thoughts and feelings and… not quite memories.

See, I recently found out that… well, I’ll let Sven Beckert tell it:

It was a stormy November morning in 1900 when the Graf Waldersee steamed out of the port of New York for its journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the German city of Hamburg. Among the more than two thousand travelers who glanced one last time at the receding steeples of Trinity Church, the towering Manhattan Life Insurance Company building, and the Statue of Liberty, four passengers stood out: James N. Calloway, John Robinson, Allen Burks, and Shepherd Lincoln Harris. All were the sons of slaves from Alabama, and all were connected to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Calloway was a Tuskegee teacher, and Robinson, Burks, and Harris were students or recent graduates. Perhaps even more remarkable was their mission: They had boarded the Graf Waldersee that morning on a journey to new jobs in a faraway land—the German colony of Togo. On the western coast of Africa, they were to instruct the German colonialists and their subjects on how to grow cotton for export, “to determine the possibility of a rational cotton culture as a native culture, and … to show the marketability of the product for German industry.”^{1 From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton}

That person, James Nathan Calloway? He was my great-grandfather. That’s just… weird. I’d always heard, to the extent that I was even interested in the past at that time, that he was connected in some way with the Tuskegee Institute, and my mother once mentioned that he spoke German and had a sword that was presented to him by the Kaiser in Germany (I think she got that part a bit wrong). But when I idly did a Google search one day I was shocked to find him on there. And even more shocked when I found out about the Togo expedition.

The paper at the link is just an abstract but I think I can get the full thing through school. I haven’t yet but I need to, to find out the full story or as full as I can.

Whenever I think of Togo now, though, I wonder… how much damage was done to the people who lived there, their families, their way of life, did the knowledge of cotton planting help them later, after the Germans were gone, and lots else besides.

The journey to the past, once you start on it, never goes in a straight line, it seems. It bobs and weaves and takes off down dark and scary roads, or zooms down byways and you sometimes wind up in some pretty unexpected places. Like Togo.

[Story/chapter synopsis from William Still’s “Underground Railroad”.]

Anyway it’s called The Book of Louis and while it’s still a bit scattered, it is open. I’ll pull it all together soon.

bloodhound

I guess I’d never seen one in person before, though I could have sworn I had. Droopy eyed,  loose-limbed pleasant and fairly harmless looking creatures, in my imagination (or possibly from cartoons or book descriptions). And some may indeed fit that description.

Not this one. The eyes may have been droopy, but the face meant business. Hugely muscled body, looked more like a pit bull than anything else as it pulled its handler up the stairs of the mall, where they were apparently looking for someone.

Anyway, I have issues with dogs so I was pretty rattled – but considering all the reading I’ve been doing about the antebellum South, my first was to wonder if this was the sort of dog that they brought out to track runaway slaves.  Pretty scary to think of something like that being after you. It sort of brought all that home to me, sort of freaky even though I was standing in the middle of a modern mall, not the object of the dog’s interest and not running through the woods.

I’ll have to add that to my research list, though.

Some of the stories are amazing. The people are amazing. I’ll be writing about them in one way or another this month and probably beyond. There is a lot of material and my hope is that writing it out will help to settle it in my mind, particularly since there are other books to get through. I still don’t have the sense that I need of  knowing, of being able to walk the paths that my ancestors walked, or to even envision what the paths looked like. So, more to go. More to read.

Actually, I think maybe I am going about this all wrong. Well, not *all* wrong, but wrong enough. I have a few books on slavery and such checked out at the moment, some of them I’ve even renewed – after three weeks already of not reading them. One, Blassingame’s “The Slave Community” I rushed through this weekend – interrupting my reading of Bound for Canaan -because someone had it on request so I couldn’t renew it, but reading at that speed doesn’t allow for reflection and greater absorbsion. I do recall most of it, but it feels incomplete so I may have to check it out again in a few weeks.

Anyway, instead of just reading one right after another, probably it would be best to just read one, absorb it, write about it, look up related things and get to know *that* topic well, before moving on to the next. It might help me also imagine and write out or plot out scenes or chapters and such, too, so that I keep the book writing goal in mind.

Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus M. Bordewich

Already I have been leafing through the extensive bibliography in this book, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, by Fergus M. Bordewich, in order to see what’s going to be somewhere next on my list.  A never ending learning process (thank goodness).

Anyway, this isn’t a review, it’s more part of the research I am doing in preparation for writing my own book.  I don’t have the knowledge to review it, really, anyway.  I mean, I can say that the writing is engaging and holds my interest – although I am having a little trouble following some of the events and timelines, as he dovetails a lot – and that it is informative and all that. And it is. However, as it’s the first book I’ve read on this subject (amazing, huh?), I am not in a position to compare the information to anything beyond the Black History Month celebrations of Harriet Tubman. Whose life and contributions, it turns out, is only part of a vast, rich story, peopled with heroes and villians big and small, Black and white, that spanned almost a century (not, in the beginning, called the “underground railroad”, of course, as railroads themselves hadn’t been invented at the time). This in no way subtracts from her accomplishments, by the way, just brings others who have been forgotten to the fore a bit.

Also, I haven’t finished the book, another reason this isn’t a review. More of a page in a notebook where I plan to, in this and subsequent posts, jot my (mostly disconnected) thoughts down about different sections and events that I want to keep handy. As I can’t mark up the book itself (it belongs to the library and they don’t take kindly to that type of stuff), where I can I’ll just link to the place or at least the chapter or page in the Google books version. Which is limited preview, so there are parts where that won’t work, but still.

One thing impressed upon me while reading this book is the fact that almost nowhere in the US was safe for black people, free or slave. At any time, in almost any place, they could be snatched up and either returned back to wherever they had escaped from, or be stolen from their lives as free persons and sold into slavery. In fact, in some cases it was safer to travel as a slave with papers than as a free person, because while kidnapping, assault, rape,  and forcible captivity of a free Black person (even small children) was perfectly fine – to do the same to one claimed by another was theft – and greatly frowned upon.

For instance, New York, in the 1800′s, depended on the South for it’s prosperity as the city was part of what was called the Cotton Triangle. Not only did the trade in cotton and other goods to and from the South, moving through the NY ports, make some New Yorkers rich, the city was also host to second homes for many wealthy Southerners. New York law allowed them to maintain their households, slaves included (even though slavery itself was illegal in NY) for up to nine months, but no one bothered them if they stayed longer.

At the same time, NY state’s constitution “unfairly applied property qualifications to disqualify all but a handful of black voters. African Americans were almost completely excluded from colleges and public schools, and segregated in theaters, eating places, and accomodations.”

For all that getting to “the North” was the goal of many escapees, in some areas life was not very much better. New York was one of them. The city itself was virulently racist and the authorities were friendly to slavery – professional slave hunters, city constables, local lawyers and more comprised an informal ring that the abolitionists dubbed the “New York Kidnapping Club”.

One of the most poignant passages for me is this:

“It was not an uncommon sight for recaptured slaves to be seen being marched down Broadway in chains to a waiting steamer bound for the South. Seven-year-old Henry Scott, for instance, was physically snatched from his classroom by a city policeman and a Virginia planter who claimed him as his slave.”

I’ve been to NYC and if I ever get back there I’ll never look at Broadway the same way again.

Also, I can’t help but apply the imagery to events in the present day, with the ICE raids of past years and the rounding up of Latinos as “illegal immigrants”, the tearing apart of families, the incarceration of children and more atrocities besides. It’s not, of course, exactly the same but it requires, I believe, the same sort of um… beliefs and attitudes regarding the humanity (or lack of it) of another person.

I need to get to other parts of the book and other notes, but it will have to wait for another day.