Belinda was an African slave,
snatched from her parents at age 12 and brought in chains along with 300 others
across the Atlantic.
For the next 50 years, she toiled
for her master until the war came and the master fled, leaving Belinda and her
sickly daughter to fend for themselves in a world that had no place for an
elderly black woman and her child.
Belinda''s story didn''t take place in
the antebellum South. It happened in colonial Massachusetts. The grand house
where Belinda''s master lived, with the slave
quarters just a stone''s throw
away, was in Medford, less than a mile from where Tufts University now stands.
The grand Georgian house and its
slave quarters in the only remaining free-standing slave housing north of the
Mason-Dixon line still exist. Known as the Royall House, named for the family
who once lived there, the buildings at 15 George St. are now owned by the
Royall House Association.
An ongoing exhibition at the Royall
House Slave Quarters, "From Africa to Medford: The Untold Story of the
Royall House Slaves," chronicles the experiences of Belinda and her fellow
slaves in the world of servitude in which they lived, the Africa from which
they had come and the events that would change the world for their descendants.
The force behind the exhibition is a
diverse group of Tufts students and Medford residents. The students enrolled in
"Memories of the Slave Trade," a course taught by Rosalind Shaw, associate professor of
anthropology.
''A special place''
"The Royall House Slave Quarters is a very special place on our
doorstep," Shaw said. The exhibit "should be about the slaves who
lived and worked here, who they were, what they and other slaves and free blacks
in Medford achieved, so we can get a sense of them as people."
The community members who worked on
the exhibition included representatives of the Royall House Association,
including Medford High School history
teacher Jay Griffin, who co-taught the Tufts course with Shaw; Medford High
School students and members of Medford''s African American community. Griffin is
president of the Medford Historical Society and site administrator for the
Royall House.
The existence of the Royall House
Slave Quarters belies the idea that
slavery was a specifically southern
phenomenon. During the 17th and 18th centuries, port cities such as Boston and
Medford were active in the Atlantic slave trade, and many prominent families in
the Massachusetts Bay Colony owned slaves.
"In New England, there has been
enormous social amnesia about the role of the slave trade and the presence of
slaves," said Shaw, whose latest book is Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual
and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
"In the North, everyone denies
the fact that there may have been involvement in the slave trade," said
Barbara Bailey, one of the community advisers to the class. "We can''t
ignore it. We need to find out what the truth is. In school, we heard it was always in the South. People up
here have been glad to ignore it."
"Massachusetts has always
trumpeted that it was the first state to abolish slavery," Griffin said.
But, it was also the first colony to legalize slavery. And unenslaved blacks
were not at liberty in the Bay Colony. Laws specifically restricted the
movement of all people of color, and free blacks could be kidnapped in ports
like Boston and sold as slaves.
"You were never really
free," said Shaw. "You could, at any moment, be taken."
Even after the abolition of slavery
in Massachusetts, African Americans did not enjoy the same civil liberties as
white citizens, Shaw said. Laws were instituted about the control of
"unruly people of color." For example, blacks were often prohibited
from being outdoors after 9 p.m.
Historic moment
Isaac Royall, an Englishman, arrived in Medford from Antigua with his 27 slaves
in d to Nova Scotia at the start of the Revolution, leaving his
slaves behind and prompting a unique episode in early American history.
In 1783, eight years after Royall''s
departure and the same year that Massachusetts outlawed slavery Belinda,
presumably with the help of a prominent black abolitionist named Prince Hall,
drafted a petition to the Commonwealth requesting a pension from the remaining
assets of the Royall estate.
"She makes the argument that
the wealth of her former owner was accumulated partly by her hands," Shaw
said. "She asks the state to acknowledge that the
wealth was
derived from the slaves he owned. She asks that the ideals of the Revolution,
of freedom and equality, apply to all the people in the worldnot only to
whites."
It was an unheard-of action for the
time. But the court granted the petition, providing a pension for Belinda and
her daughter. "This is perhaps the earliest example of reparations for the
slave trade and slavery," Shaw said.
The text of the petition, which has
survived, also offers extraordinary detail about Belinda''s capture near the
banks of the "Rio de Valta" in present-day Ghana; her fear and
anguish at being taken from her parents and the agonizing Middle Passage. She
recalls the moment she was snatched:
"Could the Tears, the sighs and
supplications, bursting from tortured Parental affection, have blunted the keen
edge of Avarice, she might have been rescued from Agony in vain she lifted her
supplicating voice She was ravished from the bosom of her Country, from the
arms of her friends while the advanced age of her Parents, rendering them unfit
for servitude, cruelly separated her