Meditations on Africatown, Part 2: On Cultivating Liberatory Fields of Vision

Part one of this post can be found here.

I visited the Africatown Heritage House for the first time a short while ago. The new community building (as the structure is called), which houses the Clotilda Exhibition, held its long-awaited grand opening on July 8, 2023. It has since been accessible to the public for tours and events.

I stopped in late on a Wednesday afternoon, a few weeks following the opening. By this point, some of the initial excitement associated with the exhibition’s public unveiling had naturally begun to wane. I was grateful, though, for the slightly thinned crowd because it meant that I was able to move through the exhibition slowly and with intention, which one ought to do in order to appreciate more fully the sacredness of the lives lifted up and stories gathered in that site. Though totaling only around 2500 square feet of used space, the exhibition tells a deeply complex, sinuous, and multi-sensory narrative about the 110 Clotilda survivors. It brings into focus, among other things: their cultural and familial origins rooted in what was then referred to as the Kingdom of Dahomey; the relationships by which they were bound; the awful circumstances that led to their forced removal; their sustained commitment to live; and their legacies—material and otherwise—that we now inhabit. It is, in other words, a thoroughly humanizing account of a set of people whose lives, up until a short period ago, had been committed to the realm of fiction. 

On the way out of the exhibition, I was approached by one of the front desk attendants, Ms. C (which is how—for the sake of anonymity—I will refer to her throughout), who I came to discover is an Africatown resident, one whose roots in the community run deep. Having noticed my visible despondence over what I just witnessed and experienced, she motioned for me to come near, and then asked: “So, what do you think of it all?” 

I struggled to make intelligible the range and intensity of the emotions elicited by the exhibition. Coming to terms with the suffering produced by racialized enslavement can, as we know, be an unmooring, deeply fraught, and sometimes ineffable experience, even for those of us having knowledge of the kinds of terror and degradation to which enslaved people were routinely subject. Gripped by the weight of it all, the only initial words I was able to gather were those to describe a part of the exhibition where, etched against the base of one of its walls, is an outline approximating the stature of a toddler, the imagined profile of the Clotilda’s youngest survivor, Matilda McCrear, who was only two years old at the time of her kidnapping. I suspect that the additional provocation of that feature is, at a visceral level, to disabuse anyone who might encounter it of the conviction that slavery was not so terrible, or that it was somehow underwritten by an ethics that placed limits both on what enslavers did and to whom. Both of these sentiments we know to be false. That being said, I found that aspect of the exhibition to be distinctly moving because, in that moment, I was reminded of how my son, Joshua, who is now three, would not have been spared from all the varied and violent disruptions that characterized that period. 

Ms. C and I went on to discuss briefly some of Africatown’s history. She stressed, for instance, that the Clotilda survivors who founded it embodied a spirit of resourcefulness and creativity, noting how they imported in and adapted traditional cultural practices and knowledges to make life in their new, unfamiliar environments more or at all workable. These “New World” inhabitants, then, Ms. C intimated, engaged in a variety of creolizing practices—that is, in the yoking together of cultural and other elements thought utterly incompatible, producing what political theorist Jane Anna Gordon refers to as “illicit blendings.” Against a raft of dangerously suboptimal conditions, those early Africatown architects established ground fertile enough to sustain life for many years beyond the town’s establishment. After going back and forth for a bit about that, she pointed past the museum’s doors and admonished: “You see, it hasn’t always been like this; not so long ago, things were different.” 

Ms. C was referring, specifically, to some of the more physically barren (or, at least,barren-appearing) areas of the .25 square mile town and, of course, to the declining population, which had whittled down from about twelve thousand people at its peak during the 1960s to around two thousand at present. What one may see, she implored, mystifies a certain historical truth about Africatown and the people belonging to that area. That truth is that “right over there, there were berries, and that the town once had a grocery store,” she said, motioning, once again, beyond the doors. Her aunties, she subsequently recalled, were known to practice African-centered forms of herbalism and would use ancestral knowledges about the medicinal properties contained in certain herbs, roots, and plants to impart healing. As illustration, she recounted a time when one of her aunties, upon hearing that her allergies were acting up, directed her to gather some herbs, place them in boiling water, lay a towel over her head and inhale the steam pluming from the pot, which had the effect of stifling her allergies, almost instantly. These relationalities and ways of knowing, she posited, are those that you simply cannot detect by taking visual stock of the state of things as they are now. Some of these histories are submerged (often quite literally) beneath decades of industry-caused pollution, death, forms of political prevarication, and population flight. Ultimately, Ms. C sought to make known aspects of Africatown’s history that are not immediately discernible at the visual register, especially if what the individual wants to, or indeed, believes they see is a place that, in its grated-at appearance, is one that is fundamentally bereft. There is, as Ms. C would make evident, no truth in that. 

These insights remind me of a moment in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk when he takes aim at positivist social science, citing its potentially dangerous limitations and how some findings that emerge through the use of this methodology often rely on a priori assumptions about one’s object(s)/subject(s) of study, in his case black people and black communities. In other words, positivism, Du Bois argues, encourages an echo-chamber approach to social scientific inquiry, where the credibility of evidence is assayed merely on its fit within a worldview that the researcher has already determined is valid. When deployed to study black people, the effect of adopting such an approach, then, is often a reification of antiblack attitudes and values. To draw this out, Du Bois writes: 

To the car-window sociologist, to the man to who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unravelling the snarl of centuries, to such men very often the whole trouble with the black field-hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s word, “Shiftless!” They have noted repeatedly scenes like one I saw last summer. We were riding along the high road to town at the close of a long hot day. A couple of young black fellows passed up in a mule-team with several bushels of loose corn in the car. One was driving, listlessly bent forward, his elbows on his knees,—a happy go-lucky, careless picture of irresponsibility. The other was fast asleep in the bottom of the wagon. As we passed we noticed an ear of corn fall from the wagon. They never saw it,—not they…Shiftless? Yes, the personification of shiftlessness. And yet follow those boys: they are not last; to-morrow morning they’ll be up with the sun; they work hard when they do work, and they work willingly. 

I want to dwell with Du Bois’s call to “follow those boys,” an appeal that, in effect, problematizes the very epistemological and ontological standpoints as those inhabited by the “car-window sociologist.” The car-window sociologist says to herself, “what I see, is all there is,” and thus, there is no need to follow, to get out of the car, because such an effort implies that there is more, there is something to know beyond that (or who) which appears before one’s eyes. Or, as philosopher Linda Alcoff argues, writing on the visibility of social identities, it is often believed that what one “can see is what is real; all else that vies for the status for the real must be inferred from that which can be seen.” That said, to “follow” would amount to accepting a certain metastability about the social world, conceding, then, the reality that a genuine effort to know the human being is an ongoing project requiring a constant turning around, looking behind, underneath, and beyond. From a Du Boisian standpoint, then, “following” implies the adoption of a discrete mode of vision, which is the capacity or willingness the individual has to see beyond what or who appears in front of them. It is, in other words, the kind of radical vision that troubles or disrupts sight, that is, what one believes it is they see. 

Analogously, Ms. C, it seems, had appealed to me to follow her, or rather, to follow Africatown’s genealogical and historical threads to a period when life looked and indeed was different along multiple dimensions. The statement “there were berries,” for instance, brackets a time when the soil—not so saturated by pollutants generated for decades by nearby industry—was more amenable to certain agricultural practices and sourcing food directly from the land. And, calling attention to the fact of there having been a grocery store, might very well help to mold an historical geographical imaginary that resists specious ideas concerning how black people have occupied, organized, and utilized space, as well as by what those sites are and have been constituted. In other words, to know that there was, at one time, a grocery store in Africatown is to recognize a proximity between black people/blackness and sites of wellness and abundance. 

This is a critical association; antiblackness, as we know, promotes a philosophical anthropology that figures black people as disconnected from and anathema to things and places deemed vitalizing. Such a view, then, leads one to make normative claims proscribing black people’s movements and access to spaces, attitudes that, taken together, shape our politics. I will say that her words did not register as a kind of romanticism (though, that would be okay if they did express that attitude). Rather, and as I understand it, Ms. C’s recounting—her appeal for me to “follow,” to imagine the presence of a grocery store—represents a disavowal of a geographical determinism that situates black people as cloistered off from life-giving spaces. This is the kind of sight her words encourage. This all said, “following,” in the context of Africatown, helps extricate the individual from a potentially isomorphic field of vision, from the position, once again, where one takes what they see as evidence of what has always been. Ms. C’s proposal to follow is an effort to disrupt that mode of thought. 

Ultimately, what Ms. C was doing in that moment was setting the coordinates for an alternative field of vision, one that militates against a miring of Africatown’s past and future in narratives that emerge from what individuals, based on what they see, may wrongly believe is true about the community. She seems to understand, at the level of experience, that such one-dimensional vision may, then, have the effect of impairing one’s imaginative capacity, that is, of their ability take hold of something and envisage it anew, inscribed with new meaning, affordances, and value. 

Thus, like Du Bois, Ms. C places significance on “following,” that is, on positioning oneself to see more clearly what was, what is, and what might be. The lesson, here, is that one must follow to see; or, seeing clearly implies following. In the case of Africatown, one must not let its appearance overdetermine its future or overshadow its past. Remember: there were berries.

Desireé R. Melonas

Desireé R. Melonas is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Black Study and Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. In addition, she is a co-principal investigator on a National Academies of the Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Gulf Research Program Grant to co-develop environmental justice-focused curricular interventions throughout schools in and around Africatown, Alabama. Finally, Desireé is a 2020-2021 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow.