Peter H. Wood

For anyone interested in a short introduction to the African diaspora in North America, I recommend Peter H. Wood's Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America. The main text weighs in at less than 100 pages, but gives a fast-moving, substantive overview of the way colonial society became a slave society, and where the crucial turning points were. It will be a familiar story to some, but I think Wood's approach — combining big-picture perspective with individual lives — is refreshing. There's a good bibliography in the back, current through 2003.

Wood is the first author I've read who points out that African Americans, although often compared with immigrant groups, have deeper roots in America than most other Americans, as two-thirds of their ancestors arrived before 1776, and almost all of the rest were here by 1807, when Congress abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet slavery and associated legal and cultural habits kept them alien to the white majority, even as that majority silently adopted elements of African American culture, without acknowledgement. (We're talking 17th century here, not jazz and Motown.)

I was intrigued with one counterfactual speculation: The history of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke usually omits the fact that when Francis Drake arrived there in 1586, his reinforcements included liberated African and Indian slaves along with lots of captured Spanish goods and materiel. A storm wrecked most of his fleet and drowned these people. Had they survived, perhaps Roanoke, with such a mixed population, would have succeeded in a way that allowed less scope, later, for chattel slavery. As it happened, Drake returned to England, and the next, small, all-white contingent at Roanoke assimilated into surrounding Indian towns by 1590. By the time Jamestown got off the ground, the opportunity was lost.

Virginia and even Carolina (later divided into North and South Carolina) did afford some room for free black citizens for several generations, but they were too few to stop the gradual slide toward a racial caste system and perpetual, inheritable chattel slavery. Under that shadow, the memory of Roanoke was reduced to a story of the birth of Virginia Dare, the first native-born WASP — although she almost certainly ended her days as an Algonquian Indian. This book suggests that the real "lost colony" was the pre-racial one (antedating our long obsession with skin color) that just missed getting started in the summer of 1586.

Maybe it would have made a difference. Who knows?… (meer)