Margu ​“Returns” For Amistad’s 175th

In 1839 Margu was was only 9 years old when she was snatched from her home into slavery. She was marched 80 miles to the slave pens off the coast of Sierra Leone, to await the harrowing Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to Cuba.

In New Haven, she would help make history that our city is celebrating Wednesday, 175 years later after a landmark civil-rights victory.

Margu was a Muslim, from a Mende culture with an advanced legal system. Because she had never left her inland home before, she and her fellow captives, on beholding the sea for the first time, proclaimed the Atlantic Ocean ​“the big river.”

Such stereotype-breaking and humanizing details emerged from a discussion with actress Tammy Denease at the splendid Amistad Gallery at the New Haven Museum.

Thursday evening at 5:30 p.m. Denease is portraying Margu in Sarah Margu: A Child of the Amistad. The free performance at the museum is part of the citywide celebration of the 175th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that determined the 53 Amistad captives, held in New Haven, were not property to be argued over, but free human beings. It was the nation’s first civil rights victory, and the ​“Black Lives Matter” moment of its day.

WNHH radio’s ​“This Day In New Haven History” sat down with Denease and with the museum’s education director, Amy Durbin, to discuss the upcoming performance, the gallery’s highlights, and how what was arguably the most significant — and complicated — civil rights case up to the time might best be understood now.

“Most people are familiar with the legal case,” Denease said. ​“I like to put the human face on it.”

That human face included how Margu, who had ​“Sarah” added to her name by the missionary couple who adopted her, navigated the new Christian and highly capitalistic world she was encountering.

Durbin said that while the captives were being held in the New Haven jail — approximately where the statue of the captives’ leader, Cinque, now stands next to City Hall — the jailer would take the captives out on the Green periodically to get fresh air.

“They would do exercises on the Green. The jailer would sell tickets,” Durbin said. ​“As if they were part of a circus performance, for 12 cents, I believe.”

After the Supreme Court decision in 1841 liberated Margu, she and the other Africans were not provided any money to return to Africa. In Farmington, the abolitionists and missionaries taught Margu and the others to read and write. In exchange the Africans taught them how to grow rice and other crops not native to New England.

Yet they also had to go out on frequent speaking tours, for the Africans’ freedom did not come without strings attached. The evangelist abolitionists expected the Africans to help raise money not only for boat passage home to Sierra Leone, but also to establish a missionary school there.

Margu participated in all of this, as well as becoming part of the signing or deaf community in Farmington.

When the 39 remaining Africans returned to Sierra Leone, most abandoned the missionaries and went home to find their own families. Margu stayed with the missionaries at the school. Eventually her value, it was determined, would be enhanced if she got a college education.

That’s how Sarah Margu, shipped off to Oberlin College in Ohio, became the first African ever to graduate from an American college.

Denease said her take on Margu’s story is true to the conflicts the girl experienced in navigating two worlds.

As many times as Denease has portrayed Margu, she says she discovers new facets, most recently the young woman’s relationship to the deaf community in Farmington, where she lived before returning to Africa.

“I constantly find more things,” Denease said, but kept returning to ​“the determining spirit [of Margu and her colleagues] to be free and to be treated as equals.”

​“Sarah Margu: A Child of the Amistad.” will be performed at 5:30 p.m. at the New Haven Museum, 114 Whitney Ave. The event is free and open to the public.