Issues → May/June 2008 → Interact → 10 Things to Do → TRAVEL BONUS: Moose in Maine, Black History Tours, More... →

African Slaves in Portsmouth

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(page 3 of 5)

Valerie's hunger for this information did not diminish. It grew. After she married into the Air Force, Valerie got used to moving and finding what she could of the history of her people. About a year before she found Venus, Valerie found a book that legitimized her search. Browsing in the back stacks at a library in Delaware, where her husband was then stationed, she came across a book called The Negro in Colonial New England. "That was the first book on black history I had ever found. It told me for sure that there had been slavery in New England, and it specifically mentioned Portsmouth." In her long journey she had taken one very important step.

Whenever she came home to Portsmouth, on leave or else for brief stints at Pease Air Force Base, Valerie would ask her mother to take care of her children, and she would return to her task. Her early work at the library had taught her how to research things, and she learned of other sources for early history, such as the records at old churches and in city hall. Valerie needed only to have the door cracked and she was inside, scouring the records, searching and searching for those unusual names. In time she found Cesar, and she found Prince, and she found Pharaoh, Quam, Cato, Nero, Romeo, names almost cruelly inappropriate. She wrote it all in longhand in her growing notebook.

Eventually she went further into the stacks, into the old newspapers, which were stored on microfilm. Turning the crank and peering at the gauzy screen, she flipped by page after page of the New Hampshire Gazette. There she found ads for runaway slaves. These gave her physical descriptions, which thrilled her -- to have these people, to whom she now felt wed, become more than just names, more than just the property of a white man.

In the May 11, 1764, edition of the New Hampshire Gazette, she found this ad: Ran-away -- Negro Boy named Fortune, age 16, wearing a red jacket and canvas trousers.

Based on the information Valerie had gathered, Mark Sammons wrote this in The Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail: "We will never know what incident triggered Fortune's departure, perhaps an argument, a scolding, or a blow like that delivered a dozen years earlier to the ship's captain's slave. But the underlying cause was the condition and nature of enslavement. The tasks at the tavern may seem routinely domestic, but slavery was never benign. While white youths were formulating visions of their future, Fortune had few choices in life and little hope of improved status."

This reading of the old Gazettes on microfilm was a hypnotic task that absorbed Valerie so thoroughly that one night she was locked into the library. "The custodian found me late that night. It's so quiet back where I was working that they didn't know I was there. And I didn't know what time it was."

Valerie notes in her book that running away in 1764 left the unhappy slave with little choice and few places to go. "The 13 colonies combined had only a few thousand free blacks, with no community large enough for a runaway to disappear into." Aside from that one ad, Valerie found no more references to Fortune. She felt a kinship with each slave she discovered: "I always had a hard time when I read about the children being taken from their mothers. That still is hard for me to read about."

Without records of births or deaths, marriages or baptisms, slaves were an invisible presence, easily forgotten. In her search through the old newspapers, Valerie found many ads for runaways. "It's ironic that that was one way they made themselves known to me, through these ads or through something else that would make the newspaper. Otherwise there were no records of them at all. Unless they misbehaved, they simply were not accounted for."