Oluale Kossola (alias Cudjo Lewis) planned to marry.
In 1860, he was still a young man living in a Yoruba village northwest of Abomey, in the Kingdom of Dahomey in today’s Republic of Benin. He remembered how he loved to go to the market to see the beautiful girls wearing elaborate bracelets that made a pleasant jangle when they walked.
One day he saw a girl whom he liked so much that he wanted to marry her. Although he was still too young to marry, he told his family how much he liked the girl. His parents took it seriously. They reached out to her to ask her to marry their son when he was of age. We do not know what happened with the girl, but we know that this wedding never happened because not long afterward, the Dahomean army captured Kossola. He was brought to the coast, sold into slavery, and transported to Alabama on the infamous schooner Clotilda on the eve of the US Civil War. Despite the horrors of the Middle Passage, many years later, when Kossola was a freedman, he still remembered the beautiful girl he wanted to marry when he was a young man.All stages of the Atlantic slave trade and life under slavery in the Americas disrupted families and led to the separation of loved ones. But despite all the horrors they experienced, enslaved Africans and their descendants created families and re-created kin ties. In coastal slave depots, in the holds of slave vessels, on plantations, and in mines, cities, and towns, enslaved women gave birth to children and fulfilled the role of mother for their own children and the children of their fellow bondspeople. This chapter discusses the multiple dimensions of marriage and family formation under slavery. I show how enslaved men and women resisted family separation by reconstructing and building families under the most varied and often tragic circumstances. To better grasp how bondspeople created, reinvented, and preserved kinship ties, we must expand the common Western idea of the nuclear family and embrace the notion of an extended family. Consideration of enslaved people’s wider networks of relatives allows us to examine a variety of associations that do not fit the typical definition of a family but were instead often indebted to traditions prevailing in West African and West Central African societies.1 Enslaved men and women also refashioned spiritual families with shipmates during the Middle Passage and, once in the Americas, they continued to develop these connections during work hours in the fields, marketplaces, slave quarters, kitchens, and churches. In Roman Catholic societies of the Americas especially, bondspeople and freedpeople could formally marry, and by doing so they were able to re-create family ties, which they also did by diligently selecting godparents when they baptized their children.2