The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

Scholar follows centuries-old trail from Sierra Leone to slavery

By JEFF CASALE

Daily News-Record

Dec 3, 2005

HARRISONBURG, Va. – It was amid stacks of thousands of documents and records at the New-York Historical Society library that Joseph Opala found the connection.

In his hand was a document that showed the sale of slaves from Sierra Leone to plantation owners in South Carolina and Georgia.

The hand-written docket was dated June 30, 1756. Scrolling down the names, Opala came across one that caught his eye. “Elias Ball II: 3 boys, 2 girls.”

“I whooped in that library,” says Opala, a professor of African-American History and Studies at James Madison University.

Opala’s joyous discovery linked 249 years of history, records and family ties from Sierra Leone in 1756 to modern-day South Carolina.

The documents _ ship records, plantation records and newspaper ads _ allowed Opala to trace the roots of a family that started with a 10-year-old girl named Priscilla to a seventh-generation descendant in Charleston, S.C.

“You’ve got a 249-year paper trail that has been unbroken from its African roots in Sierra Leone to South Carolina,” says Opala, 55, lounging in a cushy chair at the Daily Grind in downtown Harrisonburg several months after his discovery.

“It’s like a one-in-1-million or one-in-15-million chance that you would find something like this. This is a unique situation.”

The documents that helped Opala during his research are on display in a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society in New York.

The exhibit, “Finding Priscilla’s Children: The Roots of American Slavery,” opened earlier this month and will run through March as part of the society’s show, “Slavery in New York.”

For 20 years, Opala has been searching for this connection, but he said his research objective didn’t always have this goal in mind.

Opala lived in Sierra Leone for 17 years, moving there after he joined the Peace Corps. In his 20s, Opala was a student of archeology and anthropology, and that’s what he says he planned on studying when he got to the West African country. (more…)