From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Chesapeake History and Culture).

Rodriguez, Junius P.

From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Chesapeake History and Culture). By Lorena S. Walsh (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1997. xxiv plus 336pp. $34.95).

Some might argue that biography, though a standard genre of much historical literature, often suffers from a type of tunnel vision that restricts its ability to denote sweeping interpretation because of its obsession with ubiquitous detail. Despite such criticism of this method, Lorena S. Walsh manages to reinvent the techniques of historical biography in brilliant fashion to examine the collective history of a group of Africans who were transported to Virginia during the seventeenth century and their subsequent generations of descendants who labored as slaves in Virginia's Tidewater and Piedmont regions into the nineteenth century. From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community is a magisterial work that breaks new ground in historical methodology and offers scholars an alternative model for reconstructing the collective experience of slave communities. Future studies of this type will certainly enrich our knowledge of slave culture by examining the dynamics of the community as the social arbiter of customs, traditions, beliefs, and values.

Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Walsh's work is the ability to render a vivid historical account of individuals who were largely ahistorical--living only upon the fringes of traditional documentary source materials. In this account both the African and the African forced into slavery exist not as marginal characters appearing in someone else's history, but rather as people fashioning an independent identity that stands in stark contrast to the world-view envisioned by white Virginians. The author employs the rigors of social science methodologies to find interpretation where history alone remained silent, and the effective use of interdisciplinary studies offers salient and compelling insight into a community largely unexamined through the centuries. Thus, an unrecorded and previously untold history is born from the tools of sociology, economics, plantation archaeology, genealogy, and cultural anthropology, which combine to give voice and collective identity to the slaves of Carter's Grove.

Walsh, who is a historian associated with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, first became involved in this project by researching a lecture on plantation agriculture that was designed as in-service training for interpreters who worked at Colonial Williamsburg's Carter's Grove Plantation. The author's vast knowledge of the colonial Chesapeake region facilitated the need to link "unconnected pieces of evidence" (p. xvi) into a larger interpretive framework in which the slaves who labored in Virginia had an active presence in the economic and social life of the community. Walsh spent nearly four years examining the material culture of West Africa and of colonial Virginia seeking commonalities and drawing conclusions based upon the artifacts and the documentary evidence that remained. From Calabar to Carter's Grove clearly demonstrates that it was possible for an African "local history" to survive the Diaspora and to endure even amid the hostility of an alien environment. African peoples transported to the Am ericas may have been a preliterate group that was effectively marginalized by white society upon the basis of race, status, and class, but Africans themselves represented a culture that valued history and held the concept of communal memory in esteem. Traditional African ways upheld the importance of orality and historical remembrance, but African customs also stressed the importance of place and the centrality of the ancestral village in community life. Although some scholars have speculated that the abrupt and horrid departure from Africa via the Middle Passage may have broken any real connection with an African identity, Walsh's findings indicate that true African folkways survived the transatlantic passage and continued to thrive in Virginia. Though this discovery is not entirely new within the historical literature, the extent to which African customs and traditions endured among the slaves of Carter's Grove certainly seems to be persuasive.

The type of history that Walsh produces in this work is especially powerful in the increasingly politicized climate of today as certain interests question whose history is written into the books and told through museum exhibits. If history is to be potent it must be multifaceted and it must be inclusive. The supposed silence of the sources in conveying a first-person account of slavery from the perspective of the slave has allowed a degree of justifiable criticism of interpretive technique. The type of scholarship found in Walsh's study affirms that the Africans taken to Tidewater Virginia maintained a cultural identity that they sustained for several generations against tremendous adversity. That knowledge is rich in meaning and should have profound resonance in the way that we view and interpret the history of slave culture. From Calabar to Carter's Grove has the potential of being a groundbreaking study if future scholars take their cue from the methodology that Walsh has fashioned in this work. The possi bility does exist that throughout the antebellum South other microcosms of slave culture once existed where similar research might be conducted today. The concept of community has special meaning in society and in human history--it is the measure by which we judge the civility of a people. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is through the collective biography of a slave community that we fathom the essence of communal self-identity that heretofore seemed marginal, or practically nonexistent in the historical records. Biographies of this type are not only important, they are imperative.