San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Former U-T reporter pens bio about Black Civil War vet
Shortly after 9/11, a group of Palestinian students had some questions for an American reporter about the lives and history of Muslims in America that sent him on a decadeslong journey, researching and writing about Muslims who had been in the United States since a few years after the Mayflower came ashore, through the American Revolution and the Civil War. Dean Calbreath, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former reporter with The San Diego Union-tribune, ultimately focused on one man, featured in his new book, “The Sergeant: The Incredible Life of Nicholas Said.”
“Initially, my plan was to do a book about all of these Muslims that I encountered from history . ... I actually did a whole anthology of these people that I found, looking for Muslim names,” said Calbreath, who was part of the Pulitzer-winning team that broke the story of former U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham taking more than $2 million in bribes. One of the names Calbreath searched for was Mohammed, coming across Mohammed Ali ben Said, whose name was later changed to Nicholas. “That’s how I stumbled across his name and immediately felt drawn to him because of his wit, his urbane intelligence and sense of character, and also his love of travel, his love of learning languages. These are things that I also have, and I felt very close to him.”
Said (pronounced Sy-eed) was born in the kingdom of Borno, today known as northern Nigeria, to a famed general in about the 1830s. He was the 13th of his mother’s 19 children, his mother being among the four of his father’s wives. As a young teen, he was kidnapped and sold into slavery, which would eventually lead to his traversing Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. Here, he would join one of the first Black regiments in the Union Army, be appointed one of the first Black voting registrars in the nation during Reconstruction, work as a teacher to freed Black children and adults in the South, and tour the lecture circuit advocating for the education and equality of Black people.
Calbreath, author and retired journalist, spent 10 years composing his book on Said (which Harvard professor and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called “essential reading”) and took some time to talk about his research, Said’s incredible adventures, and the ways that he was surprised by Said’s life experiences and perspectives. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lisa-deaderick-staff.html.)
Q: How did you find the initial information about Nicholas Said, that told you that he was someone who loved to travel and who’d learned at least nine languages?
A: He actually wrote two versions of his memoirs that were both available on the Internet, which was my first encounter with him. He wrote a story in The Atlantic in 1867, an 11-page article about his life where he describes his travels. He traveled through Africa, the Middle East, through Europe, the Caribbean, and he also described a number of languages that he spoke. He spoke French, Italian, German, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, English, and also Mandara and Kanuri, which were the African languages of his parents. His parents spoke two different languages because his father had captured his mother in war and she became one of his wives.
Q: What were some of your initial expectations of Said and who he was?
A: My initial expectations were that I was really hoping to find Said was a practicing Muslim when he came to the United States. Part of this was motivated by writing about the history of Muslims. I was hoping to find this outspoken, kind of Frederick Douglass figure who would be an advocate of civil rights and pushing for greater freedoms in the United States. What I found was, by the time he got to the United States, he totally gravitated away from Islam. He’d been kind of pressured to convert to Russian Orthodoxy when he was working for those Russian princes, and that’s where he got the name Nicholas. (His employer at the time was Nicholas Troubetzkoy, who became his godfather and gave him the name Nicholas, instead of Mohammed Ali ben Said. His godfather was the godson of Czar Nicholas, so, in a way, Nicholas Said is named after the czar.) I’d been hoping to find a practicing Muslim, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. He gravitated toward what was a very mystical philosophy by this Swedish theologian in the 1700s, who had a great sway over the transcendentalists of Boston. It was through one of his colleagues in the 55th Massachusetts that he encountered this guy, [Emanuel] Swedenborg, and his mystical ideas about the universe.
Another surprise was that he was actually a bit more conservative than I thought he would be. He was much more like Booker T. Washington than Frederick Douglass. He believed that if African Americans pursued a course of education and economic betterment, that they would gradually get the civil rights and freedoms that they deserved, but he wasn’t an advocate of pushing immediately for those rights. He thought those rights would come over time, and it turned out to be a very naive ve belief, in retrospect. On the other hand, it was kind of natural because that’s the way he had been treated in Europe, that’s the way he felt throughout his travels. Achieving education and achieving higher status would open doors for him that weren’t opened for African Americans. He did not, I think, fully appreciate the amount of ingrained racism that was created by slavery, so that was also a surprise.
Q: I know “The Sergeant” was just released, but I would imagine this isn’t the last we’ll be hearing about Said. What else would you like to see happen with Said and his story?
A: I would love it if Hollywood took a look at this, not because I wrote about it, but because I really have a lot of respect for him, and I want his name to be out there. I have this feeling of kinship to this person who’s been dead for a century. I think it would be great if it was a Hollywood miniseries with one episode concentrating on his life in Africa, another on his life in Europe, another on the Civil War, and another one on Reconstruction. His life was so varied, I think it would be hard to make it into some kind of two-hour movie because it just included such disparate elements. Thankfully, with the “Black Panther” movies and everything, most Americans have hints that there were these vibrant civilizations in Africa. Of course, Wakanda is to reality what Camelot is to reality — they are fantasies, yet they are based in the fact that Africa has these vibrant kingdoms. The kingdom of Borno where [Nicholas Said] was from, had its own literature, had its own art, had its own sciences. Europe had expanded and reached a level of technology and sciences that outstripped it by the 1800s, but for much of their history, the lives of people in African kingdoms was very similar to the lives of people in European kingdoms. It’s nice that people are beginning to get that sense of African history, and I would hope Said’s life would have them take an even closer look at that.