Woman to follow lineage back to slavery, Africa
Sierra Leone to receive descendent of Priscilla
BY HERB FRAZIER
Of The Post and Courier Staff
The girl in the painting is a captive, yet she walks with her chin up, sure she’ll survive whatever awaits her.
Her smooth, brown skin offers a sharp contrast to the muscular men who flank her. As with the men, ropes bind the girl’s hands and form a noose around her neck.
The image is how Mount Pleasant artist Dana Coleman visualized a 10-year-old girl — later named Priscilla — might have looked before she was placed on a slave ship that carried her and other African captives from Sierra Leone to Sullivan’s Island.
Now, the girl’s seventh-generation great-granddaughter, Thomalind Martin Polite of North Charleston, will present Coleman’s 18-by-24-inch acrylic painting as a gift to Sierra Leone.
Polite, a speech therapist, and her husband, Antawn Polite, a licensed clinical counselor, will be the center of attention during a celebration dubbed “Priscilla’s Homecoming” in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, from Thursday to June 2.
Polite is linked to Priscilla through the records of a Berkeley County plantation and the Hare, a New England-based slave ship that brought Priscilla in June 1756 to the Carolina Colony.
Finding both ship and plantation records to document the journey of a captured West African to America is rare in genealogical and historical research, scholars say.
The ship’s records show a pattern of slave trading that built a business relationship between Newport, R.I., Sierra Leone, Barbados and Charleston. The Hare was based at Newport and traveled to Charleston from West Africa and the Caribbean before returning to New England.
Coleman’s painting is a blend of Polite at 10 years old and the facial features of modern-day Sierra Leonean girls.
Polite is expected to present Coleman’s painting of Priscilla on June 1 to the Sierra Leone National Museum, where it will be on permanent display. She’ll also give copies to Sierra Leone’s president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, and the U.S. Embassy in Freetown for its new building.
Coleman said he wanted to depict an image of a girl who “knows she is going through trials, but she knows she is going to make it. I wanted to capture her confidence. I didn’t give the painting a title. I just call it Priscilla. I didn’t want to be hokey so that there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that it is a simple image that conjures up power, energy and strength.”
Coleman did not depend on the stereotypical images of slavery. He said he researched the subject so his painting would be historically accurate. Newly captured Africans were not bound in chains before they were placed on ships for the Atlantic crossing, said Coleman, who is art director for Media Services, a Mount Pleasant company that publishes local magazines. Instead, they were tied with rope, which was lighter for slave traders to carry. The men wore loin clothes. It was common for women and girls to wear their hair braided, he said.
Slave traders, he said, preferred healthy men and women to children. “It must have been horrific for her when she was placed in the hold of the ship,” Coleman said.
Joseph Opala, a historian at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., who leads a team organizing the homecoming, said the painting “captured the spirit of Priscilla because the slave ship records I found for the Hare show that the highest death rate onboard the ship was for little girls. Here was a little girl who survived. And what Coleman did was capture in her face her attitude of determination.”
Coleman began working on the painting in February after an unexpected meeting with Opala at Boone Hall Plantation. To get the right image, Coleman said he prepared at least 15 sketches over three months before he settled on the one he wanted. Three weeks later, the painting was complete.
Getting the proper angle was important, he said. He didn’t want the painting to be viewed from the vantage of an adult looking down at a child. Instead, he chose an upward-looking perspective to show Priscilla standing tall, he said.
A 10-year-old girl was among the children from the slave ship, Hare, according to genealogical research by Edward Ball, the author of “Slaves in the Family.” His ancestor, Elias Ball II, purchased her for his Comingtee Plantation, and named the girl Priscilla. She later married Jeffrey, and they had 10 children. She died at about age 65 in 1811.
Before Edward Ball’s book was published, he visited Polite’s father, Thomas Martin, in the early 1990s to tell him about his family’s connection with Priscilla. Martin, who died in January 1998, was a retired vice principal at Burke High School.
Opala later found the Hare’s records in the New York Historical Society Library. The records show that Elias Ball purchased two girls from the Hare after it arrived at Sullivan’s Island. One of them was 10. The detailed ship’s records also contain the captain’s accounts of the purchase of captured Africans in Sierra Leone, the date the ship left Africa, how many people survived the voyage and the day it made port.
The ship left Sierra Leone after stopping at Bunce Island. Between 1670 and 1808, enslaved Africans were shipped from Bunce Island to the West Indies, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
During her visit to Sierra Leone, Polite will spend a day at Bunce Island, in Freetown’s harbor.
For some, the place is a painful reminder of slavery. But Polite said she has no apprehensions about it. “I don’t know what I will feel when I get there,” she said. “Right now, I want to see everything.”
TO LEARN MORE
To read more about Thomalind Martin Polite’s homecoming in Sierra Leone and her seventh-generation great-grandmother, Priscilla, visit the following Web sites.
— Yale University and the Priscilla Project: www.yale.edu/priscillas-story
— NBC News • Priscilla’s Story: Family traces roots to slave island: www.nbcnews.com/video/rock-center/46406415
— Priscilla’s Homecoming: glc.yale.edu/priscillas-homecoming
— Priscilla’s Homecoming documents: glc.yale.edu/gallery/priscillas-homecoming-documents