Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from March 13, 2005
“Amistad Sunday”
Capt. Eliza N. Garfield

Scriptures:
Isaiah 31:1-16
Hebrews 11:8-16

Good morning.  It’s very good to see you all.  It’s always quite a treat for me to be invited into Mystic.  I’m invited to a lot of places because of the Amistad connection but Mystic obviously holds a very, very special place both for the ship and also for those of us who are lucky enough to have been a part of it.  I think many of you, from my previous research, have been involved or seen the Amistad from the moment her keel was laid seven years ago now to the day she was launched and then have sort of watched over our shoulders over the past five years of operation.  Who was here when the keel was laid, at the inception of this idea?  I know there were a lot of you there.  Some of you probably helped build the boat.  Well, more power to you and thank you.

It really is an honor to be here and be invited to speak on Amistad Sunday.  As many of you probably know, the month of March is a special month for Amistad.  Back in 1842, March 9th was the day that a Supreme Court case finally issued their verdict which freed the Africans and allowed them to return as free human beings to their homeland in Africa after two very, very long years.

March 25th five years ago, as many of you will remember, is also the day that Amistad was launched and began her work on the water.  Before that, there had been 27 long months of building her in which 225 people, volunteers, staff, crew all got together and put in over 70,000 hours of human labor in order to see her come to fruition.  At that time, in March 2000, I think it was Mystic Seaport that reproduced a pewter token that had been made in 1838 by the American Anti-Slavery Society which I think, if not directly produced by the Congregational Church, actually was an off-shoot of it and became the American Abolition Society.  The face of the token bears the image of a black woman kneeling and praying to God with her hands bound in chains.  Around the edge of the token, the inscription reads, “Am I not a woman and a sister?” 

When I came into this position as a female captain on Amistad, I thought this is pretty amazing.  There is something fortuitous about the launch having had that motto attached to it.  I think everyday, in the work that we do, I got asked a lot of questions one of which is always this female thing.  But I think the more important question really is if we have we answered that question.    Have we brought closure to the question, “Am I not a woman and a sister?”  I think it is odd that no one has ever asked me the question of what it feels to be a white female captain carrying the legacy of incredible human strength of a story of true African resiliency and beauty, and, of course, a story of deeply felt pain.  Perhaps, today, I’ll just take a moment and share with you what my personal experience is like on a day-to-day basis—living, working and celebrating the legacy that we carry and the works that we do aboard Amistad.

I think one important thing to recognize is how we carry a cargo.  We are a replica of a cargo vessel that, back in the 1830s, was just like the 18-wheelers we see running around on the highways today.  Nobody took much notice of the cargo vessels.  They were a dime a dozen and they were built to basically decay.  Today, our twenty-first century cargo on board the Amistad is a legacy, sort of this diaphanous hard-to-put-your-finger-on kind of thing.  We are blessed that the ship that we do this in isn’t just a throwaway 18-wheeler container.  It happens to have been built by blacks and whites together here at Mystic Seaport.  Many of you were here and know what that was like. 

Also, I think it’s important to recognize that of the tall ships today, very few, if any, were built consciously and intentionally by mixed races and people coming together to change the course of history.  The woods that the Amistad is built of, unlike her original, come from all over the world—from Africa, South America, the United States, Canada.  That makes her even more special.  She was blessed by waters from around the world.  Doves were released.  There were poems underneath the mast that represent all the different people and continents that were involved in the building of the boat.  It is truly a special gift for us today to have a vessel like this to be able to take and work with.  It’s an important cargo and an important legacy that we carry. 

We also are very, very lucky that the ship and the woods and the spirit that she brings draw people from all over the world to come and share their spirit, and their legacy and memories with us.  A Sierra Leonean Drummers Corp came and had an impromptu drumming ceremony on the quarterdeck after a hurricane had passed through.  You remember that in September last year a hurricane came through that completely flooded out New Haven.  But a group of Sierra Leoneans from Boston managed to get all the way down across I-95  through the flood and bring their drums.  They were not to be daunted by four feet of water.  They just came aboard and we had an impromptu ceremony that I’ll never forget and, I think, Amistad the vessel will never forget. 

As Captain, I’m also blessed in the mission of Amistad by an unbelievably dedicated crew who come to serve not only the needs of a living, breathing ship that demands hours and hours of maintenance and work but also to bear witness to the legacy that we carry.  After a winter in which Amistad has been wintering at Mystic Seaport, in large part because we shut down our operations to re-evaluate our work and move forward into a slightly different future than we’ve had before,  I was here alone with the vessel.  Recently, we’ve been building up the crew and we’re going into operation and launch an international voyage.  First, to Bermuda, in the spring. 

I’m very lucky to have here today three members of the crew, come from all over and join us in the work that we do.  Up here in the front is Alvah MacWilliams, our engineer, the first time with Amistad coming from Washington state.  Up in the balcony there is Leslie Allen who actually served as our engineer last year and comes back now as the third mate aboard the vessel.  We have Christine Healy who was with us last year as the Deckhand and is now serving as the boatswain.  They have all come to join us and bring the spirit back into the vessel this spring.  Many thanks to them.

I think probably the thing that  all of us are most blessed by is the human story that we carry in the ship—the story of Sengbe Pieh, a rice farmer from an area we now call Sierra Leone, who led the revolt.  53 Africans, four of whom were young children, survived and gave us the story that we are able to celebrate each year and, particularly, on Amistad Sunday.  Two of those children come down to us today in ways that very, very, very few people, if any, come down to us.  You think about the lives that were lost and taken into slavery as well as the illegal slave trade which is where the Amistad story comes from.  We don’t know their names.  Generally, they didn’t get to write letters to our president and become teachers and come down in history to us for any number of reasons. But in the Amistad story, we have two remarkable children—a young girl named Marghru who, after being freed, returned to Sierra Leone but chose to come back to the United States.  She attended Oberlin College, graduated with a teaching degree and went back to Sierra Leone to run a teaching mission.   Little Kale, a young boy who wrote the letter that has been, sort of, made famous by the phrase “make us free” to John Quincy Adams requesting that he go before the Supreme Court and speak on the Africans’ behalf.

We wake up every morning aboard that boat to fifteen or so charcoal drawings of the captives.  Most of them have a single name or a first name.  I doubt that many of the names necessarily are truly these individuals’ names.  As a historian, I did a lot of work on minorities in America, particularly African-Americans, and it’s amazing how thin the thread is for us to be able to remember these people.  When I was in graduate school, I found a collection of letters that were on rice paper from 1810 written by African-Americans in Israel.  Imagine—rice paper.  To me, this is how thin, how frail this history is.  It could go up in smoke or could disappear in a heartbeat.

Certainly, these Africans, when they revolted off the coast off Cuba, didn’t know the environment of sailing and boats.  They certainly didn’t know about North Atlantic navigation.  They certainly didn’t know where or how they could take the vessel somewhere and be free.  But against all those odds, they rose up and decided to give it a shot.  They decided to exercise their freedom in this great, uncertain world and to see what would come of it.  The gulf stream which they rode all the way up the coast was probably the only way they could have gotten from Cuba to Connecticut.  They rode up on the gulf stream and, if certain little details had been different, their ship would probably would have been shot out into the Atlantic towards Europe, never to be heard from again.  I think we can be pretty certain that there probably were other vessels where revolts occurred and lives were lost and its history was lost to us. 

There is also a prejudice factor.  It could have been different if they had landed in certain states, if they had not landed in Connecticut or in New England that was starting to fight.  There had actually been quite a history of abolition but it hadn’t necessarily been effective.  Certainly, coming to the aid of strangers from a strange land, they could easily have said were slaves and “go on back to Cuba”.  But they didn’t.  So, this small group of 53 people survived, managed to fight not only against 53 days in the North Atlantic in the winter, the weather, the currents—it was amazing what they must have had to go through.

 I know when I wake up in the middle of the night, the wind is blowing and I know that the anchor is down or I know that there are good people up on deck taking care of the vessel.  I think about what it must have been like not to be familiar with the environment of the boat, with the environment of the ocean and, certainly, with the environment of a world that would take you into slavery.  I wonder, “What did they have?  What was it that made them get through endless days, 50 somewhat days after the revolt not knowing where they were going, not knowing if they had any chance of freedom at the end?”  But something made them keep going.

One person constantly told me, “Oh, well, I like the idea of what made Sengbe Pieh revolt and people will say, ’Well, the cook threatened to eat him.’”  I think that’s giving one Cuban cook a lot more power than he deserves when you consider the fact that they spent those days out there, when they kept believing and when they held it together as a group.  Most groups, as we know in the United States, once they band together there’s so much infighting they can tear themselves apart.  Yet, these people didn’t allow that happen.

As we do our work both on the boat and with the public and getting the message out to different communities around America, I think all of us are very privileged to wake up in the morning and look at the faces there, to look at Sengbe Pieh, to look at the captives and to think about how we can carry their legacy forward and make a difference in the world that we live in today.

Each of us, I’m sure, comes to the Amistad, as each of us comes to the things that we care deeply about  in our lives for different reasons from different places.  We’ve had one black captain, Bill Pinkney, who I think had spoken here.  Ideally, my job description is to replace myself with many, many, many more Bill Pinkneys—black sailors, black engineers, black captains.  Yet, we’re still far from that.  Our mission is not only carrying a history forward but it’s also living that history—making Sengbe Pieh and Margrhu’s mission come alive today in ways that we still have to keep fighting for.

I got three interesting phone calls this week that I’ll tell you about.  One was from the Boy Scouts of the State of Connecticut who decided they want to volunteer on Amistad.  This is terrific, don’t get me wrong, but there are probably about 10,000 Boy Scouts in Connecticut  and Amistad is 80 feet long.  How do I diplomatically say, “Well, one troop might be readily welcome.”  I also got a phone call from some folks in the military who discovered that, because of our status as the tall ship of the State of Connecticut, they can do their weekend community service aboard the Amistad and get out of drills and a whole bunch of other things that they would like to avoid.  Then, I got a phone call from a group with an interesting name, the Tuskegee Airmen.  Many of you probably know that the Tuskegee Institute has both a rich and valuable history as well as some very frightening chapters in their history.  The Tuskegee Airmen are a bunch of African-American Harley-Davidson-riding motorcyclists who have decided that they would adopt the Amistad and volunteer as well.  So, I’m imagining the Tuskegee Airmen arriving in Mystic, muzzlers blaring and 10,000 Boy Scouts all arriving at the same time. 

I’m imagining trying to figure out how we’re going to manage this and how we’re going to celebrate all their enthusiasm, your enthusiasm, as well and of people from all over the state and much further afield who seek to bring this message to life in the work that we do every single day.    Hopefully, they and all the rest will take it home and do the work away from the 80 feet of Amistad—in our communities, in our hearts, in our families, and in places where we still know we have so much work to do.

We have so many stories from the Amistad.  I’ll just share two of them with you.  One of them was about a young person who came aboard the boat and was asked, “How do you become a slave?”  This young boy said, “It’s when they take your mind and they take your soul.”  I think today in our world, this is as much a message we need to hear now as it was back in the 1830s.  As long as we keep a hold of our minds and our souls, and we know where those drive us, and how we can make a difference with it, and that we take action in the world—I think that’s what Amistad teaches us most.  When we commit ourselves, our hands, and our acts to those things that we truly believe in, then we really can make a  difference to those other people out in the world who may not have some of the freedoms that we have of our minds and our souls.

The other story is about a woman who came up to me last August or September when we were in Martha’s Vineyard.  I actually hadn’t been able to take the ship off the dock because of weather conditions.  So, we had to cancel a sail.  She confided in me that she had brought along a small box of her father’s ashes that she was hoping to just deposit over the rail of the Amistad that morning.  It’s amazing how many people have these special stories to share with us and how simple it is to open our hearts and open the space of the Amistad and the lessons and legacies not only from the past but to today and to the future and say, “Yes!  Yes, we will do a ceremony.  Yes, we will participate in what’s meaningful in your lives and hopefully, we will make a real difference by those small acts that we can do, each and everyone of us as we go forward.”

To end, we have a little ceremony that we are going to do here which we normally do on the ship—the ringing of the bell.  We have a small ship’s bell and we invite people to ring the bell.  But here you have a whole steeple and more dramatic ways to ring a bell.  We ring the bell aboard the ship for the 53 Africans both in memory but, as well, in carrying the message forward and in believing in a future where the Amistad story may no longer need to be told.

(The bell is rung 53 times.)