Allan Appel Photo
He was only a boy around 8 when he was brought as a slave to New England. At the same age she came with her family as immigrants to New York and then New Haven. Now an eighth-grader, Kadiatou Diallo discovered she and a freed slave and Colonial American success story named Venture Smith just might hail from the same part of Africa, Guinea, some 280 years apart.
The moment of recognition came Friday afternoon as Diallo and about a 100 seventh and eighth graders participated in a Black History Month presentation at the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy in the Hill.
Portrayed by North Eastern University history professor Robert Hall, “Smith” answered the kids’ questions while remaining in character.
After a failed attempt to escape, Smith bought his freedom after 25 years of slavery by dint of hard work as a carpenter, whaler, and other trades. He become a major landowner around Haddam, Connecticut, in the years after the American Revolution, bought his wife and children’s freedom, and dictated his life’s story in 1798.
“His is one of America’s great freedom stories,” said Chandler Saint, president of the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights, which has organized the Documenting Venture Smith Project.
The group brought the event to three New Haven sites Friday: Cooperative Arts and Humanities High school in the morning, then Worthington Hooker and Clemente in the afternoon.
Smith’s story is not only one of a dozen slave narratives that have survived. It’s also the only one that describes life in Africa before enslavement.
It turns out too that Smith was the son of a prince in an Africa that had polygamy.
So the Clemente kids wanted to know about that.
Smith/Hall’s answer: Polygamy was not a wild free for all. There were rules, with, for example, senior wives having privileges.
Another student wanted to know what it was like seeing a white man for the first time.
Answer: “I thought they were a little pale and had stringy hair.”
Mair’ead Brennan (pictured) wanted to know whether it took long for Smith, as a royal personage, to adjust to slavery.
“Excellent question. Slavery was not unknown in Africa. But it was different [from America]. There was honor if your owner was honorable,” Smith/Hall answered.
Kadiatou wanted to know whether he missed Africa and ever thought of returning. She didn’t ask the question; her friend did instead.
Smith/Hall’s answer: No. His village would have been destroyed, his family killed, and his path to kingship eliminated. And he was doing very well in America.
After the session, Hall and the Guinea-born student chatted about Africa.
She said she looks forward to visiting Africa. She said she feels she has one foot in each continent, she said. Kadiatou was not familiar with the Middle Passage or the forts at Goree Island, off Senegal, one of the most infamous holding areas for the slaves before shipment, or locations in current day Ghana, which Smith’s narrative mentions.
However, she was pleased to have met a “countryman.”
Diallo said she looks forward to telling her dad about meeting Venture Smith.
That will have to wait a bit, she said. Currently he’s in Guinea.
