The story begins in the present time, with two women on a beach. You can hear the wind in the waves, the shrieks of the seagulls, and the scrunch of their feet as they walk across the sand. “I wonder a lot about what they went through,” says one, a catch in her voice. “I wonder what it was like.” As the sound of the sea grows louder, with a deep baritone hum scoring underneath, the narrator begins.
They say our people were born on the water. When it occurred, no one can say for certain.... It was after the fear had turned to despair, and the despair to resignation, and the resignation gave way, finally, to resolve. They knew then, that they would never hug their grandmothers again or share a laugh with a cousin during his nuptials, or sing their baby softly to sleep with the same lullabies that their mothers had once sung to them….
The narrator is Nikole Hannah-Jones, staff writer at The New York Times and host of their latest narrative podcast, 1619 , part of a larger project that seeks to “reframe the country’s history” by looking at the deep and unacknowledged consequences of slavery.
The first African slaves
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the landing of the first African slaves on the ironically named Point Comfort on the coast of the English colony of Virginia. Drawing on content that has been presented as a collection of essays in the NYT magazine , along with oral histories, fiction and poetry, the podcast series offers in five parts much more than a history lesson.
The series begins with the troubling question of how democracy was visualised by the young nation, with the words “all men are created equal” ringing untrue even as they became enshrined in what is perhaps the world’s best-known founding documents.
To explore this question, Hannah-Jones intersperses personal history with research, showing how the experience of enslavement, and then segregation, is no more than a few generations, often a grandparent’s story away, for most African-American families.
Global networks
In this, as also in later episodes, the unsparing investigative eye is trained on the past to explain the extreme inequities of the present — from the ways in which global financial networks benefitted from slave labour (‘The economy that slavery built’) to the denial of access to health care (‘How the bad blood started’).
But in episode three, we take a slightly different turn, when cultural critic Wesley Morris gives us a delightful recounting of ‘The birth of American music’. We tune into American soft rock with Morris as he discovers that “every song has something about it that is similar to the other songs.” In the excitement of his realisation, Morris practically dances us in and out of the most popular melodies of the 70s and 80s to argue that what he is hearing, whether in Kenny Loggins or David Bowie, “is blackness.” And “in the most perversely ironic way,” he continues, “it is this historical pain that is responsible for this music.”
In a talk she gave last year, Nikole Hannah-Jones described the legacy of slavery as, “a history that is very difficult to bear and admit” and therefore usually glossed over. 1619 is an attempt to make that history visible — and audible — and impossible to ignore.
(A fortnightly series on podcasts.)
The Hyderabad-based writer and academic is a neatnik fighting a losing battle with the clutter in her head.
