“The Survivors of the Clotilda” tells of the last slave ship
Kossula was just 19 years old when rival African warriors swept through his town in what is now Nigeria, killing and capturing him and others. The captives walked for days, then were penned up for weeks before being loaded onto the Clotilda for a 45- day journey across the water to the United States.
Terrified, the prisoners of that 1860 voyage were crowded onto “shelves, their clothes ripped from them, and they lay for days in their own filth, crying for water and food.” Once they reached their destination, they were chained and marched through swamps and woods until they were sold into slavery.
After a lifetime that included brutal slavery and years of poverty and starvation, Kossula, still remembered the terrors of his capture and the details of his homeland shortly before his death in 1935, at the age of 94. So did other survivors of the Clotilda. Even in their last days, they wanted to return to Africa. The last Clotilda survivor was Matilda, who was abducted as a 2- year- old. She died in 1940 at age 81 or 82.
Although America had long outlawed slave ships, stealthy slavers still managed to land their cargo of Africans in the antebellum South. Over the years, some 36,000 slave- ship voyages were made across the Atlantic to the Americas. The 110 captives on the Clotilda were a small number of the estimated 12.5 million who made the voyages to the Americas starting in the early 1700s. The Clotilda was the last slave ship to land in the United States, in 1860.
In a heavily researched book, Hannah Durkin tells the story of the Clotilda’s voyage and its aftermath. “The Survivors of the Clothilda” follows the men and women from their capture in Africa to their lives as slave sin the U.S. South and finally to their years as free people. The book is an extraordinary story of the captives, who faced brutal oppression and discrimination. Even as free men and women, some still spent their lives working on the plantations of their enslavers. Most spent their post-slavery years in poverty and near starvation.
The Clotilda’s voyage came about as a bet between wealthy slave- owners that they could sneak a shipload of Africans into the U. S. without government knowledge. The Africans, who had no idea their miserable journey would get even worse once the ship landed, were acquired by plantation owners looking for strong men to work the fields and fertile women to provide additional slaves.
Dinah, 13, who family legend says was sold for only a dime because she was so small, was sent to the cotton fields to work. She was forced to live in a cabin with four young, healthy men who raped her repeatedly, until, after giving birth, she was sent to cook and clean for an enslaver’s wife. “The slave women were bred like they breed hogs and cows,” her great- granddaughter said in a 2002 interview.
Dinah never got over her rage at her kidnapping and captivity, and in later years, forced her great- grandchildren to listen daily to the story of her life so that they would never forget.
At age 46, Dinah moved to Gee’s Bend, Ala., near where she had been enslaved, and may have become one of the community’s famed quilters. The quilters used worn- out clothes in their quilts, in part to memorialize loved ones. “I can point to my grandmother’s dress and tell my kids what she did in that dress,” said a later Gee’s Bend quilter. “We didn’t have cameras growing up; we had quilts.” Discovered 50 years ago by textiles connoisseurs, Gee’s Bend unique quilts made from used work clothes are rich examples of Black folk art.
A s the years passed, the story of the Clotilda and its cargo of Africans became sanitized. Journalists discovered survivors such as Kossula and wrote about them in a patronizing way. They were turned into Uncle Remus- like characters and the brutality of their lives softened.
With her research and her sympathetic writing, Durkin has rescued the survivors of the Clotilda from such ignominy. “The Survivors of the Clotilda is a gripping account of one of the most despicable events in U. S. history.