Pulling Back the Veil: History and Memory of the Cape Coast Castle (Part 2)

by Courtney Luke

William St. Clair’s book, The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade, details the logistical history of the Cape Coast Castle- its day-to-day operations, the facts of the lives of the officers and soldiers who worked and lived there, the design and architecture of the building, but missing from his extensive history are the voices of those for whom the Castle and its dungeons were built. St. Clair asks how historians can cope with the fact that the enslaved are silent. He says that the journey of memory of the Castles can only be made in the imagination.[15]

In her second chapter devoted to the memory of time in slave Castles, “So Many Dungeons,” Hartman does the work that St. Clair asks and imaginatively delves into the interior lives of those who had spent time at the Cape Coast Castle and how their lost narratives connect to the narrative of her own family and African-Americans at large. Hartman depicts The Cape Coast Castle as an entity that ingests those who walk through its tunnels. In many ways, the ingestion she imagined as she walked through it represents the ingestion of the stories of the enslaved, swallowed and never given air to breathe again. Because the dungeons feel empty for her, nothing enduring “except blood, shit, and dirt,” [16]Hartman struggles again with the feeling of profound loss and disappointment. Rather than connect with the edifice of the Castle, her goal is to use it as a place to revive memory and being. Her sincere wish is “to reach through time and touch the prisoners” who were once held in the dungeon.[17]Because of the frequently unmet desire in her to know the stories of the enslaved, Hartman begins to recognize that the only stories that are to be told will be the ones told by her.[18]She gives readers a full description of what time in the dungeon would have been like for an enslaved person, describing the muck, disease, blood, stench, and physical violence they endured before the Middle Passage. Then in an attempt to rewrite the memories of Ottobah Cugoano, who left out of his narrative the horrors that were not to be described, Hartman takes readers back to the moment of his capture and remembers his time in the dungeon. In her narrative, she includes many details that were included in Cugoano’s original telling, but she makes them more personal under her pen then there were able to be under Cugoano’s. She does what Morrison refers to as “drawing back the veil” that once muted indescribable horrors.[19] Hartman remembers Cugoano’s experiences through the eyes and voice of a child, rather than that of a man whose writing must be shrewd with emotion in order to garner the support of white abolitionists. Her account reclaims the emotions that are missing from Cugoano’s time in the dungeon, and her writing allows her to reach out and touch the prisoners as she wanted. Cugoano’s first moments in the dungeon in Hartman’s retelling are as follows:

Inside the cell, it was so dark he could barely discern the other bodies chained to the wall. The odor made his insides spill out. The filth from the floor clung to his legs and buttocks and he made an even worse mess of things. After the first day, his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he saw more clearly the men and boys imprisoned in the room. Ashamed, he pretended not to see. The odor of rotting things no longer made his stomach heave. He no longer recoiled when vermin scuttled across his body. He learned to take shallow gulps of the fetid air.[20]

Hartman recreates for herself and Cugoano the story that he should have been able to tell. The inclusion of the filth, his bowels spilling out, the shame he feels, the smell of the air- all details Hartman wanted to experience for herself in order to gain a better understanding of her past and present as a descendant of people who may have been prisoners in this Castle. This Castle for her and many others is a place to enact her identity of both real and imagined pasts, and remembering Cugoano’s narrative allows for the Castle to be the site of memory that she can recognize and reclaim herself and her ancestors.[21]

         Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing has a project similar to Saidiya Hartman’s in that she is attempting to recover a multitude of lost and forgotten narratives of both Africans who participated in the slave trade as traders, and as Africans ruthlessly sold into slavery. Taking place in what is now known as Ghana and the United States, Gyasi’s story begins in the 1700s and continues through the present day. The story begins with two sisters, one sold into slavery, and the other married to a slave trader who lives at the Cape Coast Castle. The rest of the novel continues with vignettes from a descendant in each generation, alternating between Ghana and the U.S. For the purposes of this paper I will be focusing on the start of this beautiful collection of memories, and looking at how Gyasi depicts the vastly different experiences of each sister who spent time in the Cape Coast Castle. One sister was wife to the governor of the Castle, and the other a nameless captive. Gyasi’s recollection of memory differs from Hartman in that she uses fiction to delve deeper into the archive of imagination to give readers what the perspective can be from the slaver and the enslaved. Her depictions of these two African sisters shows readers that the perpetrators were not immune to the evil they created. The memories unknowingly shared between the two harken on the permanent loss of memory and story that exists in the Castle today. Furthermore, in its privileging of memory, the novel seems to suggest that memories, while often lost and erased, are nonetheless reliable and consistent. Indeed, the novel’s resolution insists that absences and untruths are the source or evidence of harm and that telling stories and truths can only be redemptive, healing, and liberating.[22]By creating and sharing the memories of the sisters from two sides of the Castle, Gyasi redeems them both, proving that by diving into the interior life of both women a deeper understanding of how the Castle exists in contradiction can bring a fuller knowledge of the role it plays in the lives of those in the Diaspora.

         Effia is the sister who marries James Collins, governor of the Cape Coast Castle and whose experience with the Castle and its horrors are marked by ambiguity and protection, yet the quiet knowledge that what is happening beneath its hall is dark and evil. Effia arrives at the Castle, having never been near it before, only having seen it in passing. After her marriage she moves in and is in “complete awe, running her hands along the fine furniture made from wood the color of her father’s skin, the silk hanging so smooth they felt like a kiss.”[23]The moment of fascination with the wealth of the Castle is quickly interrupted with a breeze. Effia notices the wind on her feet and “carried up with the breeze, came a faint crying sound.”[24]Horrified she begs to return home, but her husband reminds her of her abusive mother, and Effia acquiesces and stays with him. Readers become aware at this moment of the paradox and nuances of the African presence in the Castles. The women who live there are aware that there are people who look like them, their fates separated by only sheer chance and luck. At the end of her story, other “wenches” of the British living in the Castle mention the enslaved living beneath them, noting how the enslaved are just like them: “There are people down there, you know...There are women down there who like us, and our husbands must learn to tell the difference.”[25]Gyasi captures the thin line that these women walk being married to men in such an evil profession. Effia then begins to wonder if her husband is haunted by what he sees, and how that plays into their marriage. The Castle for her is a precarious place, a place of unspoken secrets and often ignoring the ever-present evil of slavery. The irony of her position is profound as her sister will soon be locked in its dungeons without her knowledge. 

         Effia’s comfort and ability to opt-out of engaging with the dungeons is contrasts heavily with her sister Esi’s experience as a captive held in the prisons. The first line of Esi’s story is “The smell was unbearable.” Contrasted with the free air that Effia breathed as she toured the Castle, Esi’s story begins without breath, without the luxury of setting suffering aside. She tells readers that her life has become two separate times, she has “learned to split her life into Before the Castle and Now.”[26]The essence of this sentence illustrates what Hartman refers to in Lose Your Mother when she writes that the dungeon is a tomb, a place of social death.[27]Esi now inhabits that space, and has learned to remove her old self from her new enslaved self. She experiences sexual assault, lays for weeks up to her ankles in bodily excrement, and before moving forward to the Middle Passage, encounters James Collins, her sister’s husband, for the first time.. The haunting that Effia wonders about comes to pass in their meeting, “Governor James to Esi. He looked at her carefully, then blinked his eyes and shook his head. He looked at her again, and then began checking her body as he had done the others...He gave her a pitying look, as though he understood, but Esi wondered if he could. He motioned, and before she could think, the other soldier was herding them out of the dungeon.”[28]For a moment, readers can imagine that Esi becomes Effia in his mind. Gyasi captures the irony of one life being indispensable and the other being valued as a mother and wife. What Collins fails to do is recognize the life of his wife’s kin, and sends her way further into social death. The dungeon functions for these sisters as the site of ultimate paradox, disavowal, and permanent familial estrangement. The Castle is the place where family becomes torn, even for those who believe themselves to be above the loss and violence. The memories shared between the slavers and enslaved become fragmented, and they are unable to see one another in their full light and life. Gyasi draws the veil back on this family and uses the site of the castle to highlight how the legacies created here are forever intertwined, as the rest of her novel goes on to detail the lives of these sisters’ descendants, bringing them to meet again in another life. 

         What Gyasi accomplishes in fiction that is missing from Hartman’s memoir is the possibility of redemption. Because the reality of the Castle is that it is a void of human memory and life, Hartman in the real world can only imagine what could be, but fiction presents readers with a world that is. Although the Castle is a place of violence at the start of the novel, in the end the two sisters’ descendants return together and celebrate their friendship, their survival, their lives. Hartman is unable to celebrate because, for her, her reality in the Castle remains empty and is filled with loss. She chooses to remain true to her pain, while Gyasi creates a world in which that possibility of redemption becomes joy and closure. Hartman relies on stories that she created out of people who have written before but left out the details of the castle. Gyasi pulls back the veil by creating new characters and lives from history and the possibility of what memories could be there. Relying on themselves, both women venture into the site of memory with their minds set on capturing the sordid details, and restoring honor to the dishonored and forgotten.

Image from CNN.com