Africatown

Africatown: America’s Last Slave Ship and the Community it Created
By Nick Tabor
St. Martin’s Press, 2023
Cloth, $29.99
African American History/Alabama
Reviewed by Scotty E. Kirkland 

Writer and critic Hilton Als tells us that when you read a writer’s work in a popular magazine, you are really seeing two writers. “There’s the person who has something to say, and the person who has to make that something fit.” In 2018, journalist Nick Tabor began working on a New York Magazine article about the descendants of Cudjo Lewis, the best-known captive of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach American shores. Lewis and more than 100 other Africans were forcibly removed from their homeland and brought to the shores of Mobile Bay in 1860. Global interest in the Clotilda saga was spurred in 2018 by the discovery of what was thought to be the wreckage of the ship. It wasn’t. But the following year, underwater archaeologists found what remained of the Clotilda in the muddy waters of the Mobile Tensaw Delta.   

Between these two discoveries, Tabor penned his article on the descendants. But he knew there was more to say than would fit, more he learned from his interviews and visits to the community built by many of the former Clotilda captives after the Civil War. The place called Africatown was a once-thriving community that, by the twenty-first century, was plagued by benign neglect on the part of white elected officials and built upon generations of environmental and political racism.  

Leaving New York behind and relocating to Mobile for more than a year, Tabor did an enviable thing: He moved closer to the story, close to many of the women and men he had previously interviewed, the historical documents available on the Clotilda, and the site of the newly uncovered wreckage and all it portended. Readers of his book Africatown are the beneficiaries of just how thoroughly Tabor understands this community. Few others who have written on this saga over the past century have spent more time in Africatown than Nick Tabor. His persistence is born out through his learned and careful prose. 

Tabor charts a long history of the survivors of the Clotilda and the community they built in the shadow of Alabama’s port city, from its earliest inhabitants through the Jim Crow era and into modern times as residents labor to keep the community alive. He treats his multigenerational cast of characters with almost equal weight. As such, readers are given important biographies of many of the Clotilda’s captives as well as their modern-day descendants. In Tabor’s hands, we see a hard truth. The struggles of these individuals, struggles for recognition, respect, even their ability to exist, often remain the same whether they lived in the 1870s, the 1970s, or the present day. Of the many books published since the Clotilda’s discovery, Tabor’s is the first to grasp this long and unfinished story with both hands. In this regard, Africatown is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the oftentimes rough intersections of industry and community, and of public policy and public history. 

In the opening pages of Africatown, Tabor quotes Saidiya Hartman, who writes of the unfinished struggle to understand the history of the International Slave Trade. She asks, “To what end does one conjure the ghosts of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present?” What will become of Africatown in the next decade is the unfolding question, the unfinished struggle at the end of Tabor’s book. Will Africatown become a kind of Pilgrim’s Rock, an international historic site marking the transatlantic slave trade? Will earnest community leaders and local folk be at the center of these efforts, or will they be pushed aside by more powerful actors? Can Mobile, can the State of Alabama, rise to the occasion presented by the Clotilda’s discovery and remove the barriers that have stunted Africatown’s opportunities over the past half-century? As Tabor’s book shows us, these persistent questions have long, entangled historical roots.       

Scotty E. Kirkland is a writer and historian and a frequent contributor to Alabama Heritage and Business Alabama magazines.