`Atlantic Sound' retraces path of the slave trade
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"The Atlantic Sound"
by Caryl Phillips
Knopf, $26
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Beginning in the 16th century, the African slave trade deposited Africans in numerous locales on the eastern coast of the so-called New World. After the end of slavery and colonialism, they became a part of the nations that had once enslaved them, viewing themselves as a part of the African diaspora.
Caryl Phillips, the distinguished British novelist of West Indian ancestry, succeeds brilliantly in "The Atlantic Sound" in introducing us to the indomitable courage and perseverance of black people everywhere to find a place of sanctuary and peace. Melding three genres - history, travelogue and fiction - Phillips contrasts interesting stories of personalities and places out of the diaspora's past with his own contemporary experiences in the same places.
Retracing the triangle of the Atlantic slave trade, Phillips begins in the Caribbean, visiting Martinique, Costa Rica and Guatemala, while traveling on a German freighter whose captain repeatedly characterizes each country as a "banana republic."
Next, he journeys from the Caribbean to Liverpool, England, once the world's largest and richest slave-trading port. Here, John Emmanuel Ocansey arrived from the Gold Coast in 1881 to investigate why a steam launch his father had commissioned and paid for with the very large sum of 2,678 pounds, had not been delivered.
Ocansey soon discovered that the English agent had bilked his father. Writing of Ocansey's unsuccessful attempts to recover his father's money through the British courts, the support provided by his landlady and the minister of the neighboring church, and the strange sights and sounds of 19th-century Liverpool, Phillips uses such a deft narrative touch that one feels the depression of this young African, abroad in a strange land, where so many of his expectations of Christian fairness proved false.
Besieged by Liverpool's unsavory history, a history he relates dispassionately and with easy grace, Phillips flees the city, "where history is so physically present, yet so glaringly absent from people's consciousness."
In Ghana, he meets Mohammed Mansour Nassirudeen, his chauffeur. No ordinary driver, Mohammed has been to England where, in trying to work and get a degree so he could join the privileged class back home, he ran afoul of British law for violating his student work permit.
His desperate attempt to avoid deportation failed. He is back home, unable to return to Britain, but with strong hopes of one day immigrating to the United States. Phillips also encounters African Americans who have "come home" to Ghana, but who, though at times ambivalent in their new home, find relief from the racism back home.
Completing the last leg of the "triangular slave trade," Phillips visits the grandnephew of the late federal judge Julius Waties Waring in Charleston, S.C. In 1946, a black veteran, Isaac Woodward, was beaten to insensibility, his eyes gouged out by Batesburg, S.C., police chief Lynwood Shull. Yet, an all-white jury acquitted the police chief, despite his well-documented guilt. Judge Waring protested to the U.S. Department of Justice:
"I was shocked at the hypocrisy of my government and your government in submitting that disgraceful case before a jury. I was also hurt that I was made a party to it, because I had to be a party to it, however unwilling I was."
Waring compounded this breach of Southern racial mores by divorcing his wife, a Charleston belle, and marrying a divorced Northerner. The judge argued that black people must be allowed to vote in the Democratic party primaries in South Carolina, and received death threats and rocks thrown through his windows. Judge Waring resigned in 1952 and moved to New York City.
Phillips visits the judge's grandnephew, Tom Waring, and Ruby Cornwell, a black friend of the Warings. Cornwell remembers how Julius Waring changed when he became a federal judge.
"You see," she tells Phillips, "he was faced with so much reality that he could not ignore it . . . From Saul, he became Paul." But Waring's grandnephew, Tom Waring, is ambivalent, commenting only: "So you're interested in the judge. Well, that's good. I reckon that's good."
Nonetheless, Phillips sees signs of hope. At the Charleston Festival of African and Caribbean Art, blacks and whites dance together in the streets, not far from Magnolia Cemetery, where the judge and his Northern wife rest in peace. But Phillips notes that "the older black couples seem proud, but cautious at this open display of pride in all things African. They remember when a black person could not vote in South Carolina."
Finally, Phillips visits the newest site of the African diaspora, Israel, where a number of African Americans have lived for the past 30 years. Fleeing American racism and ghettos, they believe they have returned to their ancestral home, even though they live on bare necessities in a land of scorching daytime heat and biting nighttime cold. However, in "a world that does not recognize them," and " a land they cannot tame," they serenely persevere, comforted by their beliefs and practices gleaned from the first five books of the Bible.
The people of the African diaspora, like all human beings, seek joy, peace and dignity. Phillips, through his weave of history, personal stories, remembrances and his own reflections, gives us an engrossing, enlightening, surprisingly uplifting work that testifies to the resilience and optimism of humanity.
John C. Walter is professor of African-American history in the American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington.