At Home in Exile

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” —Audre Lorde

As a person of trans experience, I think frequently about what it has meant to name myself. As a child, pink-frilled dresses, shiny patent-leather Mary Janes, and itchy white stockings signaled to the world that I was a girl. I was gendered female, and, as a result, my surrounding community followed a host of spoken and unspoken cues about how to raise me, how to punish me, and how to limit my access to joy. 

Even now, as an agender androgynous person, I feel the lingering effects of those lessons. They’re so familiar to me, caressing my cheeks like a mother’s touch. But I am not a girl. I’ve never been a girl. And, now, pronouns like “she” and “her” clank against my body, a ringing reminder that the world will always have a role for me. While reading Hannah Durkin’s 2024 book, The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade, this experience—being violently and permanently cast in a role, renamed and remade, assaulted, beaten, and forced into conditions not made for human souls—kept coming up for me. Even after the conditions of that casting have fallen away, we still feel the tremors.

Durkin’s book offers a small look into what that experience may have been like for the Yoruba-speaking people who were kidnapped from villages—in what would be present-day southwest Nigeria, extending into Benin and Togo—and sold into enslavement. These people, who mostly worked as farmers and foragers, were kidnapped in the mid-19th century as the transatlantic slave trade became heavily reliant on Indigenous captors, in this case the Dahomey warriors, to supply enslavers with prisoners from African tribes in neighboring communities. Many of those taken were children or young adults, considered too young to undergo the rites of passage that would signal adulthood in their communities. This meant they were essentially nameless and without the belonging of older villagers.

While the 2022 hit film The Woman King chronicled the Dahomey tribe’s role in the slave trade, Survivors of the Clotilda tells another side of the story. The Dahomey, who were also vulnerable to captivity and enslavement, aligned with white captors out of self-preservation and scarcity, hallmarks of global racial capitalism. “Dahomey’s imperial growth and engagement in this trade was probably precipitated by a desire to protect its own citizens against the threat of transatlantic enslavement,” Durkin writes. 

As Durkin notes, enslaved people rarely kept their original names. Instead, they were met with terror from the moment they encountered Dahomey fighters, who often ripped them from their communities under the cloak of night. They were made to watch their fellow townspeople decapitated and maimed. Then, they were forced to march alongside the heads of the slain as a reminder to never rebel. The Dahomey kept them in putrid conditions until white slavers came to collect their human goods. The Dahomey knew that to be a part of one’s own tribe—one’s own people—was to act as if one was human. And, in the eyes of white captors, the Yoruba-speaking captives certainly were not.

The stolen souls hidden in the cargo hold of the Clotilda were suspended across space and time in what Durkin calls “transatlantic dislocation.” During the transition from their homes to a foreign land, they became unnamed and unpossessed vessels, available for a white patriarchal culture to pour into and assign meaning. As scholar Hortense Spillers wrote in her 1987 Diacritics article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” “These captive persons, without names their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all.”

It’s an unimaginable sensation—being ripped away from everything and everyone one knows and sent along an unknown journey. Cast in darkness, veiled by the intentions of the ship’s masters, this voyage was dually defined by the power and privilege of wealthy slavers and the refashioning of the African townspeople and children into tradable commodities. These humans were rendered invisible by a system meant to wash away the African continent and its various traditions, ceremonies, and practices. 

That’s the reason the Clotilda, the ship at the center of Durkin’s book, is so important. Its final voyage in March 1860 was not only unsanctioned but also one of many expeditions meant to steal humans from the continent of Africa, forcing souls into slavery even as anti-slavery sentiment was growing across the globe. 

It is no wonder that the Yoruba-speaking people on the Clotilda’s last expedition—a liminal tribe formed along the waves of the Middle Passage—thought their captors were going to eat them. “Fears of white cannibalism were widespread throughout West Africa during the era of the transatlantic slave trade,” Durkin writes, before mentioning abolitionist Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 memoir, in which he wrote about “his abject terror of being eaten.” At the time, rumors were circulating along slave ports in southwest Africa that these white-skinned, gibberish-speaking people were not only slavers but in the business of consuming human flesh. As a result, though many of the captives on the Clotilda were starved to within inches of their lives, some still chose not to eat for fear it would make them more enticing prey for cannibalistic white captors. 

Young girls and women who survived the bowels of the Clotilda were met with another flesh-eating monster: the plantation’s systematic sexual, physical, and child abuse. Captives were transported along the Alabama River to southern Alabama and eastern Mississippi, an area called “The Black Belt” due to its rich, dark soil. This region, known for its sweltering temperatures, was fueled by barbaric slavers who cracked their whips, forced sexual relations between enslaved people, and maimed their slaves to keep them from escaping along the Underground Railroad.

Durkin tells the story of one Clotilda survivor, Dinah, who was so small when she arrived in the Black Belt at age 13, that she was sold for a dime to a vicious slave owner named Timothy Meaher. When she was taken to Meaher’s plantation, Dinah was housed with two Indigenous men and two white Americans for the sole purpose of subjecting Dinah to repeated rapes with the hope of her becoming pregnant. Meaher’s goals weren’t unique; he and other slavers wanted to take advantage of the partus sequitur ventrem legal ordinance established by the state of Virginia, which mandated that children born to enslaved women took on the condition of their mother. This meant that, no matter the freedom status of their biological father, children born to enslaved Black women were already in bondage. 

This lack of legal protection for enslaved Black women and girls was often exploited by white slave owners who would, themselves, repeatedly rape their captives. These women could neither consent nor deny the advances of any man, especially not their master. Their flesh was not theirs. One slaver named Charles Tait used this loophole to abuse young girls he enslaved, leading to 58 enslaved children being born on Tait’s property between 1819 and 1834.

When Dinah became pregnant, another pubescent enslaved child was sent into the slave quarters to take her place. In this way, enslavement became a way to make and remake gender. It labeled young girls’ and women’s bodies as not only property of their slave owners but also of the enslaved men with whom they shared quarters. The visceral and vulnerable nature of captivity made the ecosystem of slavery not only racialized but deeply gendered.

Even after the abolishment of slavery, the surviving members of the Clotilda tribe longed to return to their homeland. Rather than settle on a land where they’d experienced so much brutality, they searched for a way back to the lush trees and the smell of fruit in the air—the smell of home. But the road home never came for them. Instead, they remained in exile for the rest of their lives, struggling to define freedom in a place they called Africatown in modern-day Mobile, Alabama, where they were surrounded by other previously enslaved Black people. 

Perhaps this history resonates so deeply for me because there are parts of me that always feel exiled, even when I’m at home. There are parts of me that long to return to a place that I neither concretely remember nor possess evidence of ever having been. It’s a strange and peculiar feeling to be permanently displaced—and to have to accept that displacement because it’s the only way forward. 

But then there are the tremors, the memories, the aftershocks. The trauma never leaves the body, and the specter always looms over the flesh. Freedom, though tangible, is always textured by this tension, of being eaten alive and spit back out. The flesh is never the same.