FEATURE: Interactive Slavery Exhibit Stirs Emotion

By Lorrie Grant

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (Reuter) - Shackled at their ankles, the men and women shuffling through the building are bound by nothing but their will. No crime has been committed -- not a modern one anyway.

They stoop down and close the latches on their shackles themselves, awed by the weight and the eerily distinct sound they cast through the room as they walk.

With each step, the sound of chains rattling across the wooden floor seems to echo those that once bound black men and women from Africa herded into the holds of ships taking them to slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas.

Thousands have come to relive this tragic part of history through an interactive exhibit at the Spirit Square arts and education center here called: "A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of The Henrietta Marie." It was from this vessel that the shackles and other items from the Atlantic slave trade were recovered.

The most dramatic part of the exhibit is a recreation of the cargo hold, complete with models of captives chained to one another as recorded voices tell the slaves' stories.

For many visitors, the emotions were difficult to explain.

"I have read narratives but this is reality," said Jean Nourse, a member of the African-American Geneological Interest Group who has traced her family's roots in the United States to 1810.

"This is seeing the shackles, seeing people stacked on shelves, seeing the talent we came here with," Nourse said, referring to the display of items brought from Africa.

"I remember walking through (the cargo hold) and feeling really cramped. It's interesting to see the shackles," said college student Allison Walsh, who was among a class of honor students visiting the exhibit after studying the 1619-1865 slave period.

"The idea is not to look at it in an academic way," said Emily Seelbinder, the instructor who led the class, "but (to feel) the emotional and social impact of something like this."

The exhibit in Charlotte is the first in the South, once the citadel of American slavery. The first cargo of slaves reached American shores at Jamestown, Va., in 1619. Within a hundred years, the institution of slavery had spread to all the English colonies, but it was strongest in the South, where tobacco and rice planters came to depend upon slave labor.

Spirit Square administrators responded to concerns by some that the exhibit would spark anger and controversy by sponsoring complementary events, including a lecture series intended to open a dialogue about the meaning of the past.

Dawn Womack, the vice president for arts and education who is responsible for the exhibit that runs through January, said the interactive history lesson might help heal race relations.

The Henrietta Marie, an English merchant slave ship, left London on its second slaving voyage to Africa in 1699. Once there, glass beads, tobacco and other European products were exchanged for Africans who would work the plantations owned by Europeans in the Caribbean and the Americas.

After unloading nearly 300 slaves in Jamaica, the ship headed for home through treacherous waters, only to run aground and sink at New Ground Reef near the Dry Tortugas in 1700. But 272 years later, a Florida research team seeking Spanish treasure found the 70-foot-long triple-masted wooden vessel.

"They figured out quick from the artifacts that this ship was probably English," David Moore, an archeologist and maritime historian on the research team, said. "It did have a lot of slave shackles on it."

But the finders were more interested in treasure than in history, and another decade would pass before divers returned and found the ship's bell clearly marked "The Henrietta Marie 1699."

The find led researchers to archives in London to confirm that the ship carried slaves from West Africa for a consortium of merchants operating as the Royal African Co.

Not until 1991, however, would the ship gain fame from publicity generated after the National Association of Black Scuba Divers played a role in planning the exhibit.

They later placed a marker on the ocean floor, facing east toward Africa: "In memory and recognition of the courage, pain and suffering of enslaved African people. Speak her name and gently touch the souls of our ancestors."

The Henrietta Marie was but one of the ships that brought millions of slaves through the Middle Passage -- the distance between European holding pens in Africa and colonial auction blocks in the Caribbean and the Americas -- stowed like sardines, as a drawing of the ship's lower deck makes clear.

Historians say it is impossible to tell exactly how many Africans were taken from their native land or how many died during the brutal journey through the Middle Passage, but most estimate at least 5 million.

Reuters/Variety