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Beautiful view of a golden sunset over Kingsley Plantation's main house,
taken by Benjamin Huber during the 2005 celebration. |
I started this blog in January 2015 to feature Kingsley materials exclusively. This post is copied from a previous personal blog. For official National Park Service information on the history of the Kingsley Heritage Celebration, Click here.
Back from the South: the Eighth Annual KHC was a success; I am so proud to have helped start a tradition that pays homage to the spirit of my ancestors. Turnout is ever-increasing in these celebrations. I met lots of interesting people, each with a story of their own. Interest in the Kingsley story is spreading! The place, as always, was stunning (see Ben's photo above - he's quite a good photographer). The following is a transcript of my presentation.
Seeking the Inner Zephaniah—A Descendant's Perspective
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Emanuel Kingsley giving the keynote speech at the
2005 Kingsley Heritage Celebration.
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Given on Kingsley Plantation, FT. George Island, FL, on Occasion of the Eighth Annual Kingsley Heritage Celebration: Perspectives on Zephaniah Kingsley. Saturday, October 15, 2005
Good afternoon,
Today we celebrate the Eighth Annual Kingsley Heritage Celebration. It is extremely difficult for me to stand here and properly express how thrilled I am to be sharing these few moments with you without losing that measure of restraint every audience requires of their speaker. My heart is racing, as it always does when I encounter that unpaved road —surrounded by woods and lined with palmetto—that leads to Fort George Island.
Some of you, like me, have come from faraway places to be here today; others are lucky enough to live in this beautiful area. But we are all here because we share a special connection with this place that unites us. We have gathered to celebrate a common heritage that embraces people of diverse backgrounds from all stations in life.
Kingsley Plantation is a very special place for me, as it is, I am sure, to many of you, for different reasons. About three weeks ago I was spending some time with friends in New York, when I mentioned I would be visiting Kingsley Plantation. “A plantation?” said my friend Andrew, “why would you want to go to a plantation?” I knew where this was going, and indeed it went there. Let’s face it: who wants to glorify slavery and all its horrors? But the moment was right for me to explain how Kingsley Plantation is a place that breaks all expectations; it is a place like no other.
This is why so many who visit this place approach it as a pilgrimage of sorts; not because it’s on the tourist brochures, where it deserves to be; nor because it’s a national historic site, which it is (it’s the oldest standing plantation house in Florida). But because the experiences of those who lived here—from the original native inhabitants, to those who occupied the big house, to those who broke their backs toiling in the fields—the lives of all these people serve to teach us about ourselves as individuals and as a community; their legacy enriches us. James W. Loewen, who wrote one of my favorite books, "Lies My Teacher Told Me," recognized in another of his books that Kingsley Plantation staffers—unlike almost all other plantation sites—give a voice to those whom most historical sites would keep silent. For this, I salute Timucuan, and everybody at Kingsley Plantation, staff and volunteers, and especially Carol Clark, whose diligent planning and dedication has made this event possible.
I am connected by blood with those who were silenced and those doing the silencing, but at Kingsley Plantation, where all expectations are broken, these dynamics vanish along with so many other traditional labels. This is not the old plantation of Hollywood imagination; this is not palatial Tara—it was frontier land. Life has always been difficult here. And sitting at the head of the table was not Mrs. O’Hara, but an African woman from an elite background, who was enslaved, yet ended up as a slaveholder and plantation owner herself. She administered the place when her husband was away. And it is fair to say that this man was a bona fide racist—though not the usual kind, for he considered sub-Saharan Africans superior to Europeans. He married one, three actually, kind of. You’ll never get a boring story when it comes to the life of this house, of this site. And how the story transcends time and geography! Africa, Europe, America – three continents converge in this plot we share today.
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| Super Ranger Roger (who along with is wife Carol Clark comprises The Amazing Rangers Constellation, haha... No seriously, these guys rock!) presenting me before my speech. Image copyright NPS. |
181 years ago, my great grandmother’s grandpa John was born on this island, the youngest son of Zephaniah and Anna Madgigine; so you can imagine my connection to this place is strong—and when I talk about this as a place I mean it in the widest sense of the word: not just a physical, but also a spiritual place, a state of mind even. Another person who also cares about special places like Kingsley Plantation, is an exceptional woman who is among us today, but only in spirit. I’m talking about MaVynne Betsch, the Beach Lady. I met MaVynne back in August of 1998, when I was visiting Jacksonville. The Schafers kindly set me up in their carriage house, and Kingsley Plantation allowed me to volunteer at the visitor’s center. It was around that time that MaVynne actually discovered she was a descendant of Ana and Zephaniah, even though, as she said herself, she had always felt that connection. Dr. Shafer took me to meet the beach lady —where else— at American Beach.
“Hi Schafer!” she yelled as she stepped into the car. The second she closed that door I felt her spirit. First the air was infused with so many spices I cannot name, which took me places. I was intoxicated by her strong presence. I mean… that hair! She told me, “so we’re cousins” and that took me home. We got a quick tour of the beach. It wasn’t about the story of a place, but the life of a place—to MaVynne, American Beach was a living organism. She loved it so much, and to me it was clear that she sprung out of it organically, that she belonged there just as much as it belonged inside her. When we bid farewell, she told me: “write me someday. Just address it to MaVynne, American Beach—they’ll know where to find me.” I never did, but I tell myself now that perhaps it wasn’t necessary, because she had already become a part of me.
MaVynne, you were so many things to so many people, to me you were a direct, living link to Anna, as well as a soldier of the environment—not just the scientific environment, but of the living, breathing mother that embraces us. You spoke of strong women in your family, from Anna down to you mother, and now you have become an example for many others to follow. May your spirit find comfort in the labor of love that you dedicated your life to, that sanctuary which is American Beach.
Human situations like these give pulse to the Kingsley story. I remember that back in the first Kingsley Heritage Celebration —when this house turned 200—we shared fried chicken in this very lawn with my collateral kin—descendants of those who once tried to impede Anna and the other mixed-raced Kingsleys from obtaining their inheritance. We were just regular folks that day who shared an extraordinary connection: united by many contradictory things, by a common heritage, and by a heritage of adversity. United by our descent from Zephaniah Kingsley. It is about this paradoxical man that I’ve come to speak.
Yesterday I left an island that right now is cold and rainy (the island where Zephaniah Kingsley breathed his last back in 1843) and I arrived at another island where he breathed his strongest, surrounded by his family. I cannot offer you historical discoveries that could shed light on Zephaniah Kingsley’s trajectory, although luckily we have just heard the person most qualified to do this. I want to share with you bits and pieces of anecdotes, accounts, and clues, which might help you discover Zephaniah the individual, not Mr. Kingsley the historical figure. Hopefully, through this understanding we may come to appreciate the extent to which his actions and ideas affected others: his contemporaries, his family members, the general population of free people of color, and the enslaved.
Unbelievably, this connects me to George Bush. Back in the election of 2000 (Bush vs. Gore) so much had to do with the candidates’ personalities, and so little was heard of concrete ways to improve our quality of life. One TV anchorman concluded: "voters prefer someone they’d rather sit down and have a beer with." The importance of this concept was not lost on me, and I often wonder: what would it be like to be able to sit down and have a beer with Zephaniah? What kind of person would he be? What jokes would he crack? How can I break through years of legends, myths, historical records, public documents, and other traces of a life once lived?
Everybody creates a personality for other humans, be they historical figures or people we’ve just met. This urge to relate to others is part of our nature. I’ve been humanizing Zephaniah for a very long time, and have come to know him in my own way. It’s a hard thing to do when so much is shrouded in mystery. For the longest time, we didn’t even know where he was born, which makes the personality construction process quite difficult. Was he English? Scottish? Was he born in the South? Perhaps this isn’t too important because Zephaniah was a traveler at heart; he left Britain with his family when he was a kid, and arrived in Charleston. And even though his parents were loyalists and fled to Canada during the revolutionary war, Kingsley later returned to the US and eventually became a citizen. He traveled extensively during his youth, acquiring Spanish and Danish passports along the way. Some say he was an opportunist, I say he was flexible, open-minded, and keen, as well as a world citizen; he was the ultimate migrant. Borders were not limitations for him, and I can relate to Zephaniah’s mobile lifestyle. Kingsleys move around!
Of course Zephaniah Kingsley not only moved around aimlessly, but actually learned from others as he went along, he was a true multiculturalist. “I have known the Malay, and the African, the North American Indian, and the European,” he said. (He had also visited the Caribbean and South America.) He admired other cultures, sometimes on the opposite side—after all, he named one of his sons Osceola, a Seminole chief then waging guerilla warfare on the area, which included attacks on white settlements. No average white man would think of naming his son after the "enemy." Yet what led Zephaniah to do this? What qualities did he admire in Osceola, enough to hear the ring of that name throughout his life?
Zephaniah Kingsley didn’t approach places euro-centrically, from a fixed cultural perspective, nor was he ever condescending: he saw the good and the bad, and judiciously balanced them, to borrow some words from his methodology. Visiting Puerto Plata, a big town in the northern coast of my native Hispaniola, he remarked “the poor appearance of the town was amply compensated for by the rich verdure of the waving cocoa nut and the majestic palm trees.” Then, visiting a Sunday sermon, he noted that the congregation “would bear comparison, in point of good look or dress, to any of our white congregations in New York.” As we will see, he was to leave an important imprint on in this area.
This visit to Hispaniola, which was then entirely occupied by Haiti, is important in understanding Zephaniah Kingsley’s views on his Achilles’ tendon: slavery. It illustrates how his ideas on the subject had evolved through the years. Kingsley wrote four letters which were published in the
Working Man’s Advocate, the first US labor newspaper. The paper gave a voice to the Workingmen’s Party, which advocated then “radical” issues such as universal male suffrage, public education, protection from debt and limitation of working hours, and later on, homesteading. That Kingsley chose to print with them and corresponded with the editor—who by the way called Kingsley “an intelligent and philanthropic southern gentleman, though a large slaveholder”— shows us what a progressive person he was. He was the equivalent of a modern-day liberal; a Southern liberal, which is a rare breed.
But he had an agenda. Dr. Schafer has categorized Kingsley as a “qualified abolitionist” in his sunset years. Kingsley had no problem with this: “my neighbors call me an abolitionist; I tell them they may do so, in welcome, for it is a pity that they shouldn’t have a case of amalgamation to point at”, he told Lydia Maria Child, a prominent New York abolitionist, who in turn wrote that Kingsley “likes the abolitionists, and is a prodigious admirer of George Thompson”, a radical, militant abolitionist from England. So, in a typically contradictory fashion, Zephaniah Kingsley was an abolitionist and a slave owner.
Around the same time, Zephaniah was involved in a different crusade, one which many abolitionists were suspicious of and whose leaders tended to be white Southerners: the colonization movement. “My colonization experiment,” Kingsley called it, in the “Island of Liberty,” as he referred to Haiti. His reason for writing the
Letters from Haiti was to promote the first black republic in America as a closer alternative than Africa for black “repatriation.”
Indeed, to those 59 men, women, and children chosen to populate the fledgling settlement, Zephaniah Kingsley was a liberator. A dreamer and visionary, Kingsley had great plans for Haiti, he sincerely wished to improve the lives of his former slaves; he gave them small plots of land, and unsuccessfully tried to establish a school for their benefit. “All in Haiti will be affected,” he once said, “if I can carry out my plans.” Today, the town of Cabarete, which he founded, is a bustling tourist town, and a windsurfing Mecca; none of those enjoying the booze, fun, and sun know the singular history of Cabarete. Kingsley was such a multitalented man, that he even drew a map of the settlement, which was traditionally known as Mayorazgo de Coca, detailing topography, land use, roads, buildings, and other physical features. Today it is a main source in visualizing this vanished settlement.
Going back again to the first Kingsley Heritage Celebration, a reporter—or somebody who was interviewing Kingsley descendants for a project—asked me “do you think Zephaniah and Anna loved each other?” I was younger then, more naïve, and with way more hair on my head. I answered something like “I hope they did.” But this is an essential question because it leads us to the topic of Zephaniah Kingsley as a family man. There are different elements to this: Zephaniah as a husband, Zephaniah as a father, and Zephaniah’s beliefs and actions regarding the idea of family itself. How would I answer the love question today? Well, I would open a little book I love that’s called "The Prophet" and begin reading on page 16:
…let there be spaces in your togetherness.
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from the same cup.
Give one another of your bread, but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
just as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, though not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
I love that poem, and to me, it contains the secret to understanding Zephaniah and Ana’s relationship. Two very strong spirits, they gave each other space. To bring it to a more profane, updated setting, I often think of Bill and Hillary: they love each other, but they especially support each other’s endeavors. This level of independence befits these strong-willed achievers.
Given that these two people are no longer with us, we must search for evidence of their relationship, their admiration, and ironically as it might sound, their fidelity. I say this because in speaking of Zephaniah and Anna’s marriage, we must not forget that Kingsley was a polygamous husband with plural wives, a proof of his admiration for African society, among other things. Ana and the other wives would have been very comfortable with this, as they grew up in this system. To give you a contemporary example, during a court case, Kingsley’s son in law testified that Zephaniah and Flora "lived together and cohabitated as man and wife in Duval County" before she left for Haiti. To me, Kingsley’s polygamy reflected not a voracious taste for women, but a willingness to set his own cultural parameters. He was not to be bound by other people’s established traditions or by any type of “moral or political fanaticism.”
It should be noted that the circumstances of Zephaniah and Anna’s meeting were not symmetric. Ana did not have a choice—Kingsley purchased her as a slave. But there was something very dignified about their marriage. For one thing, Zephaniah freed Ana back in 1811; he didn’t’ have to do that. We often hear the old saying “if you love something set it free…” but few of us ever do, at least not in a literal sense. Zephaniah Kingsley did, and this matters. It says plenty about his respect for her as an individual, and it says something about their own marriage.
You see, Zephaniah always considered himself married; in his heart he did. But Florida law did not recognize his relationship, not after it became a US territory. In fact, the law hated them being together, they decided it was wrong, they decided it was immoral, and detestable, and then they decided that it should be illegal. Zephaniah could have gone to jail, because of who he loved, were it not for his wealth and relative isolation on Fort George island, right here on Kingsley plantation.
But he didn’t care what the law said, or what others though of him. Just two months before he died, he wrote his will. Usual stuff for a will: do this, do that, give so-and-so this amount, and so on. But in the last part of the will, he unwrapped his heart, and spoke from deep within it. He said “Nor do I know in what light the law may consider my acknowledged wife, Ana Madgigine Jai, as our connubial relations took place in a foreign land, where our marriage was celebrated and solemnized by her native African customs although never celebrated according to the forms of Christian usage; yet she has always been respected as my wife, and as such I acknowledge her, nor do I think that her truth, honor, integrity, moral conduct, or good sense will lose in comparison with anyone.” Heavy words—tell me this isn’t true love for someone.
As a father, Zephaniah excelled; contemporaries remarked how he treated his children, and how well educated and mannered they were. Kingsley loved them individually, and loved what they represented; they were a living vindication of his belief in racial mixing: “the intermediate grades of color” he said “are not only healthy, but when condition is favorable, they are improved in shape, strength, and beauty.” He freed them along with Ana in 1811, and would go on to establish close relationships with his children, fighting for their rights to live as equals in society dangerous to free people of color. He went into business relationships with them, allowing his son George to administer the colony in Haiti and act as his agent on the island. In his will, Zephaniah provided for his children generously, giving them not only financial support, but also some advice: “I do also solemnly enjoin my colored and natural children, that seeing the illiberal and inequitable laws of this territory will not afford to them and to their children that protection and justice which is due in civilized society to every human being: always to keep with them a will, ready made and legally executed, directing the disposal of their property after their death, until they can remove themselves and properties to some land of liberty and equal rights, where the conditions of society are governed by some law less absurd than that of color. This I strongly recommend.” This beautiful and moving passage hints at his relationship with the children while he was still alive: protective, loving, and suffering their pain.
Kingsley had become an activist trying to change “cruel and unjust laws“ especially those that persecuted his mixed-race marriage. These, along with other laws targeting the basic rights of free colored people, were being passed incrementally by the new US administration in Florida. While it was a Spanish colony, race laws were way more relaxed. Now, the bigotry was hitting home. Zephaniah, a proud and protective father, fought through many means to change these “tyrannical and repugnant” laws, including serving in the territory’s legislature, to no avail. Then he gave up and decided to vote with his feet. You have heard this story already—this is how the Kingsley family established itself in the Caribbean.
Although we must be aware of the dangers we incur when we try to judge yesterday’s people according to the standards of today, the slavery issue still nags at us. If he just hadn’t owned slaves, nor held such peculiar views on slavery, we would have left him off the hook, and he could have reached higher moral ground. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Zephaniah’s views on slavery were complex.
But there are good things even in this. For example, Zephaniah Kingsley believed that black and slave were not conjoined words. He saw slavery as a temporary if unfortunate economic situation that people were entitled to overcome, and should be given the means to do so. He advocated that the enslaved should be allowed to purchase their freedom at a rate inferior to their market cost. Slavery was not the natural condition of African Americans, but rather there should be a strong class of free black and mixed-race folks, coexisting within the mainstream.
The issue of free people of color was an important one in Kingsley’s Florida. There is a general belief that Spaniards and Portuguese people in America mixed with other races, while Anglo-Saxons didn’t. When you look around today, we realize this is not true. This was not lost on Zephaniah, who in 1833 along with other Floridians wrote to the US Congress “it cannot have escaped the observation of your honorable body that in all slaveholding countries some portion of the population—and not a very inconsiderable part—have, without the formalities of marriage ceremonies, children by colored women.” Racial mixing has always been a part of our continental history. The reason race relations are so rigid and taboo in the US compared with other American nations is because, and again I quote Zephaniah, “in all Spanish countries” those born of mixed-race unions “were free and admitted to most of the rights of Spanish subjects, especially to the natural and inherent right of legal protection from which they are now excluded.” Zephaniah understood the difference between systems, the many-tiered system of Spanish America, and the “black equals slave” mentality then dominant in the Southern US. In this sense, I think of him as a Latin Americanist; one of those who, through their lifestyle, was actually establishing one of the most racially integrated societies in the world.
While many people used the Bible to justify slavery, as well as freedom, Zephaniah Kingsley was not one of them. He was not a religious man, or at least, he didn’t follow dogmatic beliefs that mainline churches espoused; he didn’t believe in religious pageantry. In his will he simply but powerfully stated “…that whenever I happen to die my body be buried in the nearest, most convenient place without any religious ceremony whatever, and that it may be excused from the usual indiscreet formalities and parade of washing, dressing, etc, or exposure in any way, but removed, just as it died, to the common burial ground”.
By now you can see how Kingsley’s exquisite style of writing has constituted a body of wisdom I often refer to, much like others refer to special books in search of truth. Not in vain did a contemporary refer to him as “a classical scholar.” Passages like the following find a way to linger in my mind for hours: “… I doubt very much the good foundation of any policy that shrinks from rigid investigation in every shape—for how are we to correct evils without clearly understanding their causes? And liberty is but an empty name—a mere burlesque—if we fear to speak the truth.”
Kingsley was a strong man, certainly full of life and dreams until the very end. He crisscrossed the towering mountains of Hispaniola, on horseback, at age 73. He was 77 when his last child, this time with his plural wife Flora, was born in Puerto Plata. A year later, he died in New York, while preparing to set sail to visit his wives and children, and check on the progress of the town he had founded. Today, sadly, there are no traces of a human presence for us to pay homage to: as with Ana Madgigine, no portraits, no personal objects, not even a gravesite has been found.
The most valuable lesson I have learnt in trying to interpret the puzzle that is Zephaniah Kingsley is that it cannot be done methodically, because the pieces won’t fit together, even though some sections will match. The fun part in this is the actual process of discovery. This I think is the greatest challenge; but paradoxically it is what charms people and drags them closer to Zephaniah’s magnetic aura.
In searching for the inner Zephaniah, I have come to discover so much about my own self, my identity, my dreams and my expectations. Through years of hearing my great aunts talk about the fabled Kingsley inheritance, my dad once quietly told me “the real inheritance is the story itself.” I have never forgotten this. The Kingsley story has taken me places I never dreamt of–it’s been the ride of my life. I draw strength from this special heritage. Through this experience, I have met extraordinary people that have inspired me along the way. People like Dr Schafer, who has demystified Zephaniah and has given his descendants a taste of the truth, as well as provided my love for history with an inimitable example of a “wider, more human history,” to quote another great teacher; people like Kathy Tilford, who was the first person I spoke with when I called Kingsley Plantation for the first time, over ten years ago. I told her “Hi, I’m a descendant of Zephaniah Kingsley and Ana Madgigine” and she kept repeating “Oh my God, O my god…” We’ve been friends ever since. And people like Carol and Roger Clark, whose love for this site and passion for its history make Kingsley Plantation “a concrete and living reality.”
Another of these folks is Marsha Dean Felts, who gave me a copy of her book "An African Beach for African Americans." In her dedication, she wrote eight words that I feel summarize the essence of our common Kingsley Heritage. She wrote: “May God bless the ties that bind us.”
Thank you very much, and may we gather under this tent every year, for many years to come…
