Rapp son Ben Raines dives into river, discovers ship shards
Ben Raines, author of “The Last Slave Ship,” is coming to Little Washington Theatre on Sept. 16 to discuss the story of the criminal transport of slaves to the United States in 1860, and his own discovery of the evidence on April 9, 2018.
That day, Raines — the son of Rappahannock resident Susan Raines — dove into a swampy river near Mobile, Alabama, and emerged with a shard of the Clotilda, the vessel which had carried an illegal cargo of 110 West Africans to Alabama long after the U.S. had outlawed international trafficking in slaves. The voyage arose from a wager by a local steamboat captain, Timothy Meaher, who had boasted that he could buy and transport African slaves to Alabama despite the federal statute prohibiting it, signed into law by President Jefferson in 1808.
A year after Raines’ discovery, archaeologists validated the find, and the suppressed history of America’s last slave ship came back to life, prompting a complex reckoning for Alabamans, who had largely chosen to neglect or even deny this strange chapter in the harrowing saga of plantation slavery in the American South.
Raines, who is writer and filmmaker in residence at the University of South Alabama School of Marine & Environmental Sciences in Mobile, remains engaged in the Clotilda drama, particularly as it relates to the descendants of the 110 West Africans transported aboard the slave ship. These captured passengers endured five years of slavery, and soon after emancipation they organized and demanded (unsuccessfully) reparations from their former owners. But they did manage to buy land from local plantation families and founded what became Africatown near Mobile.
Though the story attracted the attention of Booker T. Washington and writer Zora Neale Hurston, many survivors of the Clotilda scheme were made to feel chagrined by their close links to Africa, and most downplayed it, or dismissed the entire saga as myth, according to Raines.
Meanwhile, descendants of Meaher, who made the wager and organized the criminal transport just before the Civil War, still impinge on the lives of the Clotilda descendants, according to Raines. The Meahers own some of the land in and around Africatown. When they decided to exit the landlord business, Africatown homes they had leased were emptied and bulldozed. On land just outside the community, heavy industrial plants arrived and churn out pollutants, according to Raines. “The same family that removed Clotilda’s passengers from Africa has continued to oppress their descendants,” he writes.
Raines’ dive in 2018, and his subsequent book, have brought to life a piece of this history. Of the 20,000-some ships that coursed the world’s oceans when the global slave trade was active, the remains of only 13 have been recovered, and of those, only one that brought slaves to the U.S.— the Clotilda.
This program, sponsored by the Rappahannock Association for Arts and Community, will begin Sept. 16 at 7 p.m., at the theater, 291 Gay St., in Little Washington. Admission is free.
Tim Carrington, who reports for Foothills Forum, is a board member of the Rappahannock Association for Arts and Community.
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