Excerpt from The Other Islanders by Frances Karttunen
If the story of Nantucket’s ancient proprietors, the Wampanoags, is one of dispossession, the story of the African Nantucketers is one of acquisition. Before the English settlers arrived, the sachems and their people had been in full occupation of the island, but in the course of a century they lost almost all their land and then almost all of them lost their lives.
The Africans brought to the island during that century so fatal to the Wampanoags had lost everything but their lives upon being taken into slavery. The survivors of the Atlantic crossing started from nothing. Arriving on Nantucket, they had no property, no personal freedom, not even their own names. The men were called by classical and biblical names: Cato, Pompey, Seneca, Nero, Moses, Jonas, Ishmael, and—ironically—Caesar and Prince. Women were given such servants’ names as Hagar, Patience, Phebe, Phyllis, Rose, and Maria.
As the ancient proprietors’ fortunes declined, the Africans on Nantucket acquired freedom, surnames, and families. Ultimately they gained admission to all the public schools. By then they had become entrepreneurs as well as household help, laborers, and mariners, and in the process they had put together a neighborhood of their own. Buying and consolidating land, they built dwelling houses, stores, a school, churches, boarding houses, workshops, barber shops, and a dance hall.
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