JAMESTOWN, Va. (RNS) — Wearing a yellow headwrap, gray skirt and soiled apron, a woman who says she is “called by the name of Angela” stood by the James River and told her story, one of faith and courage, darkness and hope.
“Every day, I rise,” said interpreter Valarie Holmes in late March on her first day portraying an enslaved woman forcibly brought to Virginia 400 years ago. “And then I ask: ‘Great Spirit, speak to me and give order to my thoughts, my words, my hands, my feet this day.’”
A group of dozens of visitors to Historic Jamestowne, the preserved site of the first permanent English settlement in the U.S., listened on the windswept banks of the river as Holmes spoke, including snippets of faith in her story.
The presentation is just one of many ways Americans are commemorating the 400th anniversary of the arrival of “taken people,” as Holmes calls the first documented Africans who arrived against their will in Virginia.
About 12.5 million Africans were transported and sold during the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries. More than 300,000 were shipped to the U.S., historians estimate. The 1860 U.S. Census recorded a U.S. slave population of close to 4 million. The Emancipation Proclamation officially freed some Southern slaves in 1863 but many blacks remained enslaved until 1865.
Archaeologists…
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