“Antoney, Negro, and Isabell, Negro” is how they were known in the 1625 ledger of Captain William Tucker of Elizabeth City, Virginia.1 In all likelihood, they also had African names only the ages know now. They may have been baptized shortly after birth, and their anglicized names conferred then by Portuguese priests who’d ventured deep into the interior of Angola, where Catholicism was well established by the sixteenth century. Or, Portuguese priests may have performed obligatory baptisms and christenings of these two young people as they were herded into the hold of the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship at anchor in Luanda Bay off the coast of Angola, in the late central-African rainy season of 1619. Let’s call them Anthony and Isabella, for our narrative.2 Two among the “20. and odd Negroes” Sir John Rolfe recorded aboard the Dutch man-of-war White Lion, lying at anchor on August 20, 1619, at the mouth of the James River off Point Comfort.3
Anthony and Isabella carried within them the germinal cells of the first Black child born in America, though on that fateful day in August 1619 they probably did not know that, nor did they know his name. Nor could they have known that symbolically they also carried within them the germinal cells of Scipio and Crispus and Nat and Sojourner and Maggie and Frederick and Booker T. and W.E.B. and Marcus and Langston and Duke and Yardbird and ’Trane and Malcolm and Martin and Rosa and Barack and Trayvon and Eric and Breonna and George . . . and me . . . and countless millions who, in some measure or part, were torn, like them, from Africa’s soil.
Anthony and Isabella stepped from the decks of the White Lion into a pinnace, bobbing in the surf off Point Comfort, Virginia; a small boat that would carry them to the White planters and merchants and colonists waiting ashore, men who had just determined their worth in terms of salted meat and vegetables and grain and the other provisions needed by the captain of the White Lion. What they did not know then, could not know then, is that in being handed over to these men, they were about to embark on a journey of unimaginably epic proportions; a heroic journey in which, during their lives, they would endure great hardships and privations; a symbolic journey that would see their work lay the foundation of the economics, politics, religion, medicine, education, industry, law enforcement, and technology of a new nation; and, a hard-earned journey that would generate great power and wealth for some that, sadly, Anthony and Isabella, and those like them, for the most part, would never share.
In their interaction with those White men ashore lay the embryonic maps of many roads, some surveyed and taken, others surveyed and deemed unworthy: American slavery, American freedom, Bacon’s Rebellion, the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the cotton gin, the Age of Sail, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, railroads, mines, oil drilling, cars, racism, lynching, Red Summer, two world wars, two Marches on Washington, the murders of Malcolm and Martin, the gunning down of Trayvon and Ahmaud, the killing of George Floyd, and the many other events shaped by the interaction of Black folks and White folks in America. Anthony and Isabella did not know this then, and neither did the men onshore, like Captain William Tucker, who would acquire and settle the couple to work on his farm near present-day Hampton, Virginia.
But today, we can know what became of those seeds, real and symbolic, which Anthony and Isabella carried within them; we can know of the roads taken and those that were not. And where they could not know, we must not forget.
Anthony and Isabella were Angolan; they came from the Kimbundu-speaking, Bantu Ndongo people of the highlands surrounding the modern-day city of N’dalatando, a little over one hundred miles inland from the coastal capital Luanda.
We may never know if they knew each other in Angola, but I can imagine they did; that their families also knew each other. And that their love may have even begun in the Angolan highlands, survived a savage capture by the Portuguese, a “death march” to the coast, the ravages of the Middle Passage, to be consummated in a strange new land.
We can say, however, that Anthony and Isabella knew each other as malungu.
Malungu, originally a Kimbundu word meaning “watercraft,” is how Angolans referred to their fellow captive shipmates. Eventually, malungu was extended to mean a close companion, compatriot, or friend. The word found its way into the Portuguese as melungo (“shipmate”) and into English as Melungeon.4 Initially, in English, it referred to an ethnically diverse group of people originating in early-seventeenth-century Virginia, Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware from Bantu Africa, with some combination of eastern Native American and northern European ancestry. Recent DNA testing has shown that Melungeons possess significant African and European DNA markers with little discernible evidence of Native American DNA.5 Others have made claims, with varying degrees of scientific and historical evidentiary support, that Abraham Lincoln, Tom Hanks, Ava Gardner, Elvis Presley, Heather Locklear, Rich Mullins, and comedian Steve Martin are also Melungeon.6
Ultimately, Melungeons settled Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, and Texas. They are often called the “Lost Tribe of Appalachia.” Some historians and heritage societies have labored to obliterate or obscure their African roots, preferring instead to describe Melungeons as having descended from the “Lost Colony of Roanoke”7 or from Mediterranean settlers. They have traced the word to melun jinn (from the Arabic meaning “evil spirit”) or the French mélange (meaning “mixture”) without ever mentioning the Kimbundu word malungu.8
But, in 1880, the Portuguese philologist Macedo Soares, citing a 1779 Portuguese dictionary, gave the definition of malungo, poetically, as: “Malungo, meu malungo . . . chama o preto a outro cativo que veio com ele na mesma embaracao.” (“Malungo, my malungo . . . one black calls to another captive who came with him on the same ship.”)9
I, too, am malungu.
I know this from the surprising results of DNA testing, which showed only one genetic hot spot in Africa on both my mother’s and my father’s side of the family, where I thought there might be two. That hot spot: Angola. On the maternal side of my family, I am descended from Africans who lived across the James River from Jamestown, forty miles upstream from that fateful anchorage at Point Comfort, in Surry, Virginia.
I would also be considered a Melungeon.
Curious about what DNA showed of my European roots, I was equally surprised to find, once again, only one major hot spot for both my mother’s and father’s side of the family. This hot spot was in northern Europe, in the Scottish Highlands.
No abstract tale from a time long ago, the story of Anthony and Isabella is my story; a story borne in my blood, which starts in Angola in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Anthony and Isabella resided in the Kingdom of Ndongo, a principality of the well-organized Kingdom of Kongo, founded in the late sixteenth century by Ngola Kiluanje, chief of a Kimbundu-speaking clan, and a migrant from Kongo. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo were at odds with each other, and also with the Portuguese.10
Both factions, however, viewed the Portuguese as arbiters of their conflict, and Christianity as the currency of that arbitration. So, seeking a declaration of independence from Kongo, between 1518 and 1571 the Kingdom of Ndongo sent three missions to Lisbon asking for missionaries, offering to be baptized, and seeking military assistance in fighting their Kongo rulers. In response, Portugal sent three military missions in return; one in 1520 and another in 1560 ended in retreat. The third, in 1571, was led by Paulo Dias de Novais, grandson of Bartolomeu Dias, the famous explorer who’d first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.
Dias operated under brutal orders from King Sebastian I of Portugal and Pope Nicholas V in Rome. Dias founded the port city of São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda (present-day Luanda) in 1576, and pushed his way inland along the Cuanza River, blessed by Lisbon to subjugate the Kingdom of Angola and by a papal bull “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery . . .”11
Religion could not hold its own against the powerful forces of profit and greed unleashed by the slave trade. A Catholic bishop, Manuel Bautista Soares, living in Angola at the time of Anthony and Isabella’s capture, lodged a complaint with the Holy See against Portuguese raids on the Ndongo, and the plunder of slaves, but to no avail.12 A Calvinist minister and ship captain, John Colyn Jope, would finally deliver Anthony, Isabella, and the other captives to a settlement in colonial Virginia.13 Jewish merchants, escaping the Portuguese Inquisition for the Dutch lowlands, held contracts, known as asientos, to deliver slaves to Spanish colonies.14 And Muslims ran a massive Trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean slave trade, where by some estimates as many as 80 to 90 percent of the estimated six to seven million captured Black Africans died before reaching their final destinations.15 Muslims also participated directly in the transatlantic slave trade to America. In places like Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, slaves were captured by Muslim African communities at war with other Africans they considered nonbelieving infidels.16 With profits to be made, and scores to be settled, all the children of Abraham were complicit.
Dias failed in his second attempt to vanquish the Kongo and the Ndongo in 1560. Ever a soldier in service of God and country, he went back again, but experience taught him he needed a better plan. So, he made alliances with both the kingdoms of the Kongo and Ndongo, often pitting one against the other in service of Portugal conquering and controlling territory. Back-and-forth conflict ensued among all three parties for more than a quarter century. A Portuguese force was ambushed and massacred by Kongo forces in 1579, leading to the narrow defeat of a subsequent Kongo invasion and a foray by Portuguese forces in 1582 up the Cuanza River whereby many Ndongo riverine principalities switched their allegiance from the Ndongo to the Portuguese.
Eventually, the Portuguese settled on the Kingdom of Kongo as an ally, and the Kingdom of Ndongo as their mortal enemy. A 1590 offensive by the Portuguese against the Ndongo capital of Kabasa was repulsed owing to an alliance between the Ndongo and the nearby Matamba, and many of the formerly pro-Portuguese principalities along the Cuanza returned to the control of the Ndongo.17
By the start of the seventeenth century, this teeter-totter warring had ceased, and a border had been formalized between the Portuguese colony of Angola centered in Luanda and the Kingdom of Ndongo. A tenuous truce prevailed, even as the Portuguese continued their expansion into Ndongo lands along the Cuanza River. In 1611, when Bento Banha Cardoso took over as governor, he once again pursued war with the Ndongo, but unlike his predecessors, he enlisted a new, lethal weapon. Cardoso made a fateful, strategic decision to align with a ruthless, feared group of nomadic raiders, neither of Kongo nor Ndongo origin, known as the Imbangala, intent on sacking and pillaging the Ndongo countryside.18
Imbangala societies were based on military, not kinship, bonds. In Imbangala kilombos (war camps) brutal control was exercised over members through a strict set of yijila (codes) that included real and symbolic infanticide, persecution of women, real or symbolic cannibalism, and the grooming of child soldiers through alcohol and terror.19 Many of the Imbangala’s tactics of control are still in use by groups in Nigeria, Uganda, Afghanistan, Colombia, and other countries around the world where child soldiers are groomed for conflict today.
Imbangala warriors smeared an ointment, maji a samba, over their bodies, believed to anoint them with invincibility.20 By the early seventeenth century, Portuguese merchants, with the insights and assistance of an English sailor named Andrew Battell, who lived as a captive among the Imbangala, were buying Imbangala war captives, mostly Ndongo, whom they sold as slaves to Iberian colonies in Central and South America.21
In the Imbangala, the Portuguese found the perfect mercenary force for their battle with the Ndongo. In 1617, Governor of Angola Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos, a successor to Cardoso, first rejected an alliance with the Imbangala before committing to it. Under Portuguese guidance, the Imbangala conducted a series of raids against the Ndongo: sacking the capital city of Kabasa, forcing King Ngola Mbandi to flee to the island of Kindonga in the Cuanza River, and capturing thousands of Ndongo subjects, royalty and commoners alike, who were then acquired by the Portuguese for sale on the other side of the Atlantic.22
Anthony and Isabella were among those Ndongo captured by the Imbangala, then marched in irons the hundred or so miles to the coast. One can only imagine them cresting a hill for their first view of the Atlantic near Luanda, seeing slave ships riding anchor in the bay, like hungry beasts with empty bellies waiting to be fed.
In the early seventeenth century, from New England to New Spain (Mexico), prior to the British engaging in a direct slave trade of their own, most Africans in the Americas came from the Ndongo region of Angola.
* * *
Christopher Columbus’s original plan failed. Had it succeeded, it’s doubtful that as many Africans would have been taken from inland Angola on death marches to the coast, and from there into the horrific Middle Passage bound for the Americas. Had it succeeded, Anthony and Isabella may never have been acquired from the Imbangala by the Portuguese for sale in Spanish colonies. Had it succeeded, the couple may have never been captured by the White Lion, then sold for victuals to Virginian colonists. Had Columbus’s original plan succeeded, the African slave trade may have not taken on the shape and magnitude, the brutality and savagery, it did. But Columbus’s original plan did fail, failed spectacularly, and one of the reasons it failed is that Columbus and his men were asymptomatic carriers of pandemics from Europe to the Americas.
When he first arrived on the island of Hispaniola in 1492, Columbus noted a friendly and peaceful indigenous Taino people. But Columbus had ventured to the Americas not for peace but for profit and for the establishment of Spain as an international power. Hispaniola’s land was fertile. The island’s climate good. Talk swirled of nearby gold. So, the Spaniards dispossessed the Taino of their land and enslaved them to work that same land and dig in the Spanish mines.
Munitions benefited the conquistadores. Taino warriors, outfitted with only clubs and spears, bows and arrows, even though poison tipped, were no match for Spanish gunpowder and rifles. But microbes benefited the conquistadores as well. For they brought with them to the New World two viral diseases ravaging the Old World: measles and smallpox.
The Taino, and the other indigenous Arawak people of Central and South America, had no biological defenses against the novel diseases, no “herd immunity,” no antibodies. Columbus touching down in the Americas unleashed what historians and epidemiologists call a “virgin soil epidemic,”23 also referred to as “the Columbian Exchange,” whereby potatoes, corn, medicinal plants, other fauna and flora, and culture passed bidirectionally between Europe and the Americas during the sixteenth century, but disease passed unidirectionally from Europe to the indigenous populations of the New World.24
Numbering a million when Columbus first arrived, the population of Taino on Hispaniola succumbed so quickly to the munitions and microbes of the Spanish that by 1520 they’d dwindled to a mere fifteen thousand.25 But the Spanish still had economies to open and profits to be made. This meant replacing Columbus’s failed plan to use indigenous slave labor with a new plan to bring in slave labor from outside of New Spain.
Africa, on the other hand, was not “virgin soil” for smallpox or measles. By the time Columbus arrived on Hispaniola in 1492, the Portuguese had already been in West Africa for nearly a century; had already comingled with West African societies, who consequently had already developed immunities similar to Europeans. West Africans, some also the beneficiaries of smallpox vaccines developed by Arabic medicine, were not nearly as susceptible to European disease as were the indigenous populations of the Americas. Thus, the Spanish turned to the Portuguese to supply them with slave labor, and the Portuguese turned to West Africa.26
A pandemic not only spreads disease, but also leaves a fundamentally altered world in its wake. At nearly 360 nanometers in length, the smallpox virus is three times the size of the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19. More than a half trillion coronavirus particles could fit on the head of a pin. Roughly, a couple of hundred million smallpox virus particles could occupy a similar space. So, Anthony and Isabella would never have known, nor could they have ever seen, that their fate was, in a strangely significant way, tied to that of a microbe that spread disease from Europe to the indigenous people of the Americas.
Ripples from a pebble dropped into a body of water flow in all directions. Apart from an unseen microbial assailant, unknown ripples ensnared Anthony and Isabella, and the others marching with them in irons toward the coast and the São João Bautista. From one direction came ripples from events colliding to give rise to their capture, like the Portuguese conflict with the Ndongo. Waiting, where ripples had not yet reached, events were yet to unfold, like their sale in Virginia and work on Captain William Tucker’s plantation. These first ripples were direct, touching not only these two young souls but the Imbangala mercenaries and the Portuguese military as well.
Yet, in these first ripples one catches the initial wavering glimpses of Black labor creating White power and wealth. Military success in Angola strengthened the Portuguese alliance with the Imbangala. It established the Imbangala as a powerful, fierce, and feared fighting force. It consolidated the Portuguese grip on power in Angola, establishing Portugal as the preeminent European power on the west coast of Africa in the sixteenth century. Victory kept wealth flowing into political and military coffers, enriching colonial governors and military commanders. With coastal Angola protected, merchants began moving to Luanda, building fabulous casas on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, enriching themselves as middlemen in the trade among Spanish and Portuguese New World colonies, Africa, and Europe through the sale of spices, ore, and, principally, human beings. Africa, more specifically Africans, became the currency of Portuguese power and wealth.
For Anthony and Isabella, and the people who lost them, these initial ripples were, no doubt, devastating. Overnight, they were ripped away from people they loved and societies they’d known. In Luanda Bay, slave ships waited for them, pirouetting around their anchors at the mercy of the wind and waves. Here, now, we first glimpse the indirect effects of building power and wealth that came into play with this traffic in human beings; and, surprising as it may be, the role that millions of Africans like Anthony and Isabella, soon-to-be African Americans, would play in creating new industries of White power and wealth in America, that land still far away. But first, we need to examine how Anthony and Isabella, and those like them, shaped and created new industries and institutions, new power and wealth in Europe. For New World colonies, before they were independent countries, were extensions of Old World Europe.
The São João Bautista (Saint John the Baptist), awaiting Anthony and Isabella, and some 350 other captive Ndongo natives, in Luanda Bay, bore the distinctive markings of a Dutch-designed and built fluyt (pronounced like the English word flute): three masts, a high stern or aftcastle, a narrow deck, and a compensatory bulbous, pear-shaped hull below her waterline. All business. Dutch naval architects and shipwrights from the city of Hoorn designed and built fluyts for cargo not conflict, for war booty not war-making, maximizing cargo space, minimizing the space or need for crew. The larger the cargo hold the more ore and spice a ship could hold, but also the more human beings; therefore, the more profit to the ship’s owners.27
But in the lines of a sixteenth-century Dutch fluyt, like the São João Bautista, one can also see technological innovations built from the lines of fifteenth-century carracks or caravels, vessels that themselves were innovations on the cogs plying the Mediterranean in prior centuries.
Early European explorers and merchants faced a problem: Human and natural resources awaited exploitation along the west coast of Africa, and beyond, but how to harvest them and safely return? Prevailing trade winds made voyages south around Cape Verde, the westernmost tip of Africa, relatively easy. But on the return leg, a cog became a “pig,” what sailors sometimes call a vessel barely capable of sailing into the wind. Cogs needed fair winds directly behind their sails, and this required tacking west almost to the coast of present-day Brazil to catch a ride home to Europe on prevailing trade winds. This was long, difficult, and dangerous. Vessels were lost, and so, too, profits.
Carracks and caravels, designed from cogs, had three or four masts, deeper drafts, and enlarged cargo holds. Carracks and caravels handled rough seas better, sailed closer to the wind, and made for shorter and safer return voyages from West Africa. Magellan, da Gama, Dias, Columbus—all of the early navigators sailed either carracks or caravels. With their enlarged cargo holds, most of the early slave ships bound from Europe to Africa, then across the Atlantic for Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas, were carracks or caravels. But technology proceeded relentlessly, in the sixteenth century as it does today, and carracks and caravels yielded to a newer, sleeker, less expensive, more specialized design: the Dutch fluyt.
Slavery drove technological innovation, and that created an additional stream of European power and wealth. In spurring new shipbuilding, Anthony and Isabella and their malungu drove the profits made by merchants who paid for the construction and use of new ships. But, behind these merchants were the profits made by bankers, or kings and queens and royals, who laid out the funds for the merchants to construct the ships that would be used to transport captured Africans to uncertain fates in the New World.
Ripples expanded ever wider from the drops of African blood in Angola. European power and wealth grew. Non-shipbuilding businesses in cities like Hoorn thrived off the shipwrights building slave ships. Banking houses and financial institutions in Amsterdam and London grew fat from the profits they made, then invested those profits in non-slave-trade-related businesses. In effect, laundering blood money. Take the hypothetical owner of a seventeenth-century Amsterdam bakery who needed capital to expand his shop. Perhaps he secured a loan from a Dutch bank at a fair interest rate, then hired workers to construct an addition to his store. He would most likely never realize how his shop’s expansion was fundamentally linked to the capture of Africans by the Imbangala, and their death march from inland to the coast.
And, we have yet to consider even more distant ripples. How, once bartered or sold in the New World, slaves built the agricultural economies of the colonies that created further European wealth. We will examine these details in later chapters.
Such ripple effects, in generating power and wealth, are not trivial. Economic analysis is based on them. Modern-day national and international economies are built from them, and destroyed by them in times of economic crisis. An understanding of how Black labor built White power and wealth begins with them—like the capture of Anthony and Isabella, and the start of their harrowing journey to America.
* * *
Who was this couple, captured and enslaved, who would then travel an ocean to begin building the power and wealth of a country, power and wealth they would not share? We know where they came from. We know many details about their passage. We know the circumstances of their arrival. Yet, we know almost nothing about who they really were. No journals of Anthony and Isabella survive. No books of their travails are known. No contemporaneous newspaper accounts of them have ever surfaced. Must they remain only names on the muster of their master?
Anthony and Isabella did have a son, William, and descendants of William Tucker have been found.28 So, we do know something about Anthony and Isabella’s family tree, but that still leaves us knowing little about them. I don’t believe we should throw up our hands and claim there’s nothing more to know. We may not be able to understand their unique traits as individual human beings, but there’s a powerful way of understanding them, and their malungu, as a whole—through the stories, more specifically the myths, that were told in the region of Africa from where they were taken.
“The myth is the public dream,” said Joseph Campbell, “and the dream is the private myth.”29 And both myths and dreams are portals into the psyche, as Carl Jung showed.30
So, for a brief moment, I want to venture into the myths that Anthony and Isabella carried with them as they headed out to sea and into the maw of the Middle Passage. For these myths may be the only portals we have into the psyches of the men and women who would then go on to build power and wealth in a New World.
Anthony and Isabella, and their malungu, did not face this long, hard, torturous passage unarmed. Nor did the families and friends and villages they left behind face their disappearance unprepared. Though in 1619 Ndongo villages had succumbed to the war hatchets and battle clubs of the Imbangala, and Ndongo men and women had been rounded up as chattel set on death marches to Portuguese ships lying off the coast, the Ndongo possessed a superior weapon that neither the Imbangala nor the Portuguese could ever capture: a deep, abiding, and widespread spirituality grounded in mythic wisdom. While this mythic wisdom connected the Ndongo in Africa, it kept them connected through the horrors of the Middle Passage, and even on the other side of the Atlantic in the Americas as well. Malungu was not based solely on a shared geography of kinship and blood, but more important, on a shared mythology of convictions and beliefs.31
Ndongo spirituality did not arise from Christianity, even though as early as 1518 Ndongo emissaries journeyed to Portugal requesting Christian missionaries in return, while pledging their conversion to Catholicism. Ndongo shrewdness should not be overlooked. In part, these overtures to the Portuguese crown stemmed from the Ndongo seeking diplomatic and political recognition as an independent polity apart from their Kongo overlords, and Portuguese military assistance in any coming conflicts against the Kongo kingdom. But Ndongo spirituality, as did most traditional African spiritual systems, possessed a remarkable flexibility and adaptability known as syncretism, whereby the rites, rituals, and symbols of a foreign spirituality were effortlessly incorporated without violence or displacement of Ndongo core beliefs.
Ndongo spirituality gave Anthony and Isabella, and those who came after them, strength when they needed it most. But that spirituality was a mixed blessing. It allowed Angolans to survive the horrors of capture and the Middle Passage. Then, on the other side of the Atlantic, it allowed them to survive the horrors and brutality of slavery. But it allowed them to survive, which also meant it allowed them to survive while creating a world whose riches and privileges they would never know. And, when Africans followed Anthony and Isabella from countries other than Angola, and also brought their native spirituality with them, their spirituality allowed them to survive in a similar way.
A good place to begin understanding the inner strength of men and women like Anthony and Isabella is by asking the questions: What happened to African societies where a husband or wife, a father or mother, a son or daughter, a good friend, suddenly disappeared in irons at the point of a weapon, never to be seen again? How did communities come to terms with such devastating losses? How did they heal?
Some years back, I was at work on a book about African mythology. Quite by accident, or perhaps by mythic design, I was one evening in the library of my local university thumbing through a book about African prophets when I stumbled upon a BaKongo myth pertaining precisely to these questions. In this myth, comrades ripped from the bosom of the BaKongo and whisked away by White men in ships were first conveyed to the realm of Mputu, and from there exiled “to an island where there was a forest with no food in it, and the sea on every side.”32
Mputu is a reference both to the Portuguese (a contraction of Mputoleezo, a KiKingo word meaning “Portuguese”) and to the mythical BaKongo realm of death, not of physical demise but an underground realm of unconscious energies and invisible powers; a realm that heroes and heroines in the myths of this region travel to, there engaging in battle with magical beings and bizarre forces. And when the forces and powers of Mputu are bested, these heroes and heroines return with gifts and boons they bestow to the everyday world. Mputu is further a reference to the “agitated waters” of the Atlantic out of which White men appeared, into which Black men and women, boys and girls, disappeared. But the waters of Mputu separated the light world above from the darkness of the unconscious below, and the human soul, said the BaKongo, travels to Mputu after life, there to be reborn in a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
Captured kinsmen and -women were heroes and heroines, the BaKongo myth relates, thrust unwillingly into the desolate landscape of Mputu to confront the dark forces and powers there. Ultimately, the myth tells of divine intervention to aid these beleaguered souls. “God gave them civilization . . . and food . . . and every needful thing.” For the BaKongo, to this day, African Americans are considered to be the hero-souls of ancestors battling their way through Mputu, who will ultimately return home as all heroes and heroines must. “We’re waiting for them,” said an old BaKongo man, “this is nobody’s country but theirs.”33
This BaKongo myth is undated. But the Ndongo were subjects of the BaKongo, which means that Anthony and Isabella may have actually heard it, and, if not, surely they knew the myth of Sudika-mbambi, the Wonder Child, son of Kimanaueze the Younger, of the Kimanaueze cycle of myths, upon which this BaKongo myth may well have been based. Stories of Sudika-mbambi, predating the Portuguese, were prevalent throughout Ndongo native lands.
Sudika-mbambi came into the world through a miraculous birth befitting a mythic hero. He issued forth from his mother’s womb talking, wielding a knife and sword, and asserting his right to be. Not long after birth, he went in search of the Makishi, forces that were terrorizing the land. Through alliance with magical beings known as the Kipalende, he vanquished the Makishi, only to have the Kipalende turn on him and capture him. They buried him deep in a hole, when magically a door opened and before Sudika-mbambi appeared a road leading to Kalunga-ngombe, king of Mputu, the underworld of souls.
A witch pointed the way to Kalunga-ngombe, who tested the hero a great many times, his ultimate trial being swallowed alive by a great underwater beast. But Sudika-mbambi was eventually released from the belly of the beast, resurrected, and went on to marry Kalunga-ngombe’s beautiful daughter. And when Sudika-mbambi grew weary of the world, he headed into the eastern sky, becoming the sound of the thunderclap.34
Kalunga-ngombe is a mythical king presiding over the realm of Kalunga, viewed alternately as either underground or underwater. Kalunga is also the threshold, symbolized by the horizon over the ocean, that separates the ordinary world above from the mythical ground of Mputu below. So Sudika-mbambi’s story—his struggles with the Makishi, capture by the Kipalende, and transit to Kalunga-ngombe—can also be read as a metaphor for the capture of African slaves and their transit to the Americas through the dreaded Middle Passage. And there is every reason to believe it was viewed just this way by Anthony and Isabella. “[T]he sea passage of slaves,” observes ethnographer Wyatt MacGaffey, “is not fully distinguished from the passage of souls, the slave trader from the witch, the geographical America from the land of the dead.”35
* * *
Records show the São João Bautista set sail from Luanda in early 1619 under the command of Captain Manuel Mendes da Cunha, carrying 350 captured Africans, 200 of whom had been loaded under a license, or asiento, held by investors in Seville to sell them in New Spain (Mexico). As a Dutch-built fluyt she was rated at 180 tunnes (a tunne in 1619 was the equivalent of a cask of Bordeaux wine).36 The Mayflower, which anchored off Plymouth in 1620, was also a Dutch fluyt, carrying 102 pilgrims, thus allowing for approximately a four-foot-by-four-foot space for each passenger to move around. Three hundred and fifty humans in an equivalently sized vessel yields just a little over a two-foot-by-two-foot space, so in all likelihood these Ndongo captives were packed tightly on their backs like sardines in the ship’s hold awaiting passage across Kalunga, and entry into Mputu, a realm ruled by the severe king Kalunga-ngombe.
And the Middle Passage, that transatlantic leg of the sea voyage between Africa and the New World, was severe, measured even by the parameters of brutality known in the modern world, like the Jewish Holocaust, the Cambodian killing fields, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, or the carnage in Rwanda. By some estimates, ten to twelve million Africans were captured; a third were killed in overland marches from their point of capture to coastal staging areas, like the steaming-hot verandas of Portuguese merchants above the beaches in Luanda, from where they were shipped; and another one-third died during or awaiting the Middle Passage. All told, a holocaust of unprecedented and unspeakable proportions.
Africans captured and marched to the coast, then packed into the holds of slave ships, gave Europeans their first taste of wealth and power built from the decimation of Black lives, a taste which gave rise to a hunger that over many centuries has never been fully sated. But these Africans, for the most part, viewed themselves as unwilling travelers on a journey into the Land of the Dead. Not easily appeased, Kalunga-ngombe, king of this land, lay waiting for Captain da Cunha, and the souls aboard the São João Bautista, on the far side of the Middle Passage. Only now, this mythical master and merchant of death and deprivation had donned the guise of a hungry British pirate.