The black border

GULLAH STORIES OF THE CAROLINA COAST
(With a Glossary)
AMBROSE E. GONZALES
COLUMBIA, S. C. THE STATE COMPANY 1922
COPYRIGHT 1922 THE STATE COMPANY
TO ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Just under the left shoulder of Africa, which juts out boldly into the Atlantic, as though to meet half way the right shoulder of South America, lie, between Sierra Leone and the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Gold Coast. It was the lure of gold and ivory that brought to these shores the enterprising traders who first offered the African slave-holders a stable foreign market for the captives of bow and spear and knobkerrie.
Out of this fetid armpit of the Dark Continent came the first black bondsmen to curse the Western world. Thence, across the narrowing ocean, but a night’s flight for Walt Whitman’s “Man-of-War-Bird”—
“At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America”—Portuguese and Spanish traders, but a few years after Columbus had set foot on San Salvador, transported their first human cargoes to the plantations of Brazil and the rich islands of the Caribbean. Here the labor of the blacks proved so profitable that the envious English soon engaged in the traffic, and during the reign of the virginal Elizabeth certain of her noble subjects sought concessions for the monopoly of the West Indian slave trade.
A generation or two later, the first slaves filtered through to the mainland colonies of North America from the Barbados, Antigua, and other West Indian Islands. After the institution had become firmly established, the New England eye, not lacking “speculation,” saw the promise of the East, and New England, pocketing her prayer book while pouching her musket balls, freighted her bluff-bowed ships with red flannel and glass beads with which to accentuate, if not to clothe, the heathen nakedness, and set sail for the rising sun. Thenceforth the New England slavers sailed in cycles, and their course was charted by rum, slaves, and molasses. The “black-birders” bartered their human cargoes for West Indian molasses, which, by a spirituous, if not a spiritual, process, became New England rum. “Old Medford” filled their holds, westerly winds filled their bellying sails, and the rum was soon converted into more slaves, to be in turn converted again into molasses in completing the gainful cycle.