logbooks, I also found myself single after twenty-five years in two long relationships, one of which had led directly into the other.
Four years earlier, my father had died, and I was helping to care for my mother, whose diagnosis of dementia had made it impossible for her to live independently. It seemed like my whole life was about the past, and about memory. I missed my father so acutely that I still did not really believe he was dead, and every night drove home by the building where he had worked during his career, as if I might see him standing at his bus stop. My mother’s steady decline cracked my heart every day, and my job was all about a story New England seemed to want to forget. I wondered how I had become, at fifty-three, so deeply enmeshed in looking backward and in regret.
I fed a handful of quarters into the microfilm reader and printed out a few pages of the logbooks documenting the purchases of slaves, and took them back to the office of the Sunday magazine to show Jeni. I still had everything to learn about the slave trade, and was sure only that these pages showed people being bought by a man who had started his journey in Connecticut.
Jeni looked at them, then up at me, and said, “Show Rob.”
Robert Forbes, then on the staff of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, had mentored me through a newspaper investigation of Connecticut and slavery and was helping me with our book. Rob is calm and patrician, and wears beautiful tweed jackets; his late father was a scholar on porcelain. An authority on the Missouri Compromise, Rob likes to drive and listens to garage bands in his car.
When I showed him the pages from the logbook, he leaped from his chair. “Where did you get these?” he demanded, repeating, “Bence Island! I can’t believe this! Bence Island!” I had thought Rob might already be familiar with the logs, but he had neither seen nor heard about them. And in the oddly novelistic way the story of these logbooks was unfolding, it turned out that the world authority on Bence Island—a man who had spent almost thirty years studying the island and the eighteenth-century slave trade in the Sierra Leone River—was working in the next room but had just stepped out for lunch.
Joseph Opala takes his mealtimes seriously, and he was having a leisurely lunch that day. I had eventually left Rob, and was piling books and notes into my car, when I heard Rob calling my name as he ran across the courtyard of the Gilder Lehrman Center building. His tie had blown over his shoulder, and he called “Come back! Joe’s back!”
Joseph Opala, a faculty member from James Madison University in Virginia, had spent the spring semester at Yale on a fellowship drafting a plan for the stabilization of Bence Island and its eighteenth-century structures, which in their unprotected state are open to the elements and prey to theft. A strongly built Oklahoman with the ruddy complexion of a farmer and the nature of a contrarian, Joe had visited Bence at the end of a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone during the mid-1970s. Trained as an anthropologist and interested in a past that is better measured in millennia than in centuries, Joe went to see the island simply as a courtesy to the American ambassador. He found a beach covered with the undisturbed remnants of the eighteenth-century slave trade and ruins cloaked in thick vegetation. He also found a story that he could not leave, and in the ruins on Bence Island he found his Troy. He has researched the island’s history for decades, and though forced to flee under a threat of death during the country’s civil war, he returns several times each year.
Joe turned pale when he saw the logbook pages. “Do you have the rest of this?” he asked. “I thought I had seen everything on Bence Island, but I haven’t seen this.” My heart pounding, I said that I didn’t have a copy of the rest of the logbooks, but that I would get one. Joe kept reading the few pages I’d brought, as if he could see more in them than was written there. He was breathing hard, and he walked in circles there in the office, while Rob beamed at him, at both of us.
I drove back to Hartford in an altered state. Something big had happened to me, was happening to me. I knew then that a door had opened, but I didn’t yet understand that sorrow was written over its portal.
THE PAST IN DREAMS
Six months after first seeing the logbooks on microfilm, I was on a plane to Belgium to catch a Swissair flight to West Africa. I had persuaded the management of my newspaper that a missing piece of Connecticut’s history was lying on the ground on an abandoned island off the coast of Sierra Leone.
A photographer and videographer from the newspaper had gone over two weeks earlier to begin photographing and making film of Bence Island. Joseph Opala, who was to be our guide and translator, also had gone over early to hire men who lived on neighboring islands to clear the ruins of the fortress on Bence of their dense vegetation.
My friends at the newspaper asked how I’d persuaded our financially conservative paper to spend thousands on a story that happened 250 years ago. I could tell that many of them thought slavery was a story I needed to get over. The earlier investigation had been published two years before, and the book that followed was nearly finished. “Everything in Connecticut isn’t about slavery,” a columnist said to me, adding that his ancestors were nineteenth-century immigrants and had nothing to do with slavery. “Are you going to write about women?” a reporter asked. “Or how about modern-day slavery?” They were good questions, I knew, but nothing in my twenty-first-century life seemed as important as decoding these eighteenth-century ships’ logs.
And the story of slavery was changing me. Those stolen people had suffered so long ago, and I could not find any place where their particular story was told. Who would speak for them, and why had a place not been made for them in our history? At our hands, they had been sold from the only home they knew into killing labor and suffering, and I was ready to do Jane Addams’s memory work. I couldn’t reconcile yet, but I was plenty ready to sift.
Though newspapers are portrayed in movies as freewheeling and democratic, they are, in my experience, intensely hierarchical and driven by favoritism. In terms of newsroom capital, I didn’t have much. I had been working for New England newspapers for twenty-eight years, and at the Hartford Courant for more than half that time. I’d spent years writing and editing features about homes, gardens, and literary figures, and if people knew me at all, it was for a 1998 series that I’d written about what makes a marriage strong. It was my bad luck that a new editor in chief had joined the newspaper the week the series ran, and he was a hard-news junkie. He hated seeing soft stories on “One,” and I heard that he had described the series at an editors’ meeting as “longer than most marriages.” The newspaper ombudsman wrote a column slamming it as a waste of precious page-one space.
I was nobody’s idea of an investigative reporter. I was just grateful to be included, and I knew that when this project was done, I would probably be assigned to the home and gardening section, writing about crabgrass and hostess gifts. (Within months, I was.)
But in an odd moment of fate that was seeming less and less accidental, a group of lost black men, women, and children had come into my hands, and had made me responsible for bringing their story back. On that day in the library when I had the powerful waking dream of the children being handed up into the slave ship, I realized that I was crying, and a sympathetic genealogist across the table pushed a box of Kleenex toward me and said, “Your people?” And I thought, they are.
Both the captives and their captors began to appear at the edge of my dreams and followed me through the day. In a dream that recurred, I saw a slave ship leaving New London harbor, but I could not read the name on the transom as it sailed away from its anchorage. Looking down from the ship’s high stern, a man in a long coat raised his three-cornered hat to me, and then looked out toward Long Island Sound.
I began to believe that something was guiding this project, and that it was not visible, or any part of Earth. From my friend sending me the news clipping, to the scholar who knew about Bence Island, to the newspaper’s financial support of a backbencher with no reputation, a kind of divine intervention seemed to be at work. When I stepped off the plane in Sierra Leone’s Freetown International Airport, and then waited for hours in a baking airplane hangar where sunlight poured in through hundreds of bullet holes in the tin roof, I knew I was lucky.