It's a story that has been repeated a million times on the continent and can be told in one sentence: a dark-skinned African was sold to the American continent as a slave by white-skinned Europeans.
Of course, there are many chilling details behind this sentence: these black men were tied behind their backs, with a long rope tied around their necks, and were caught by white slave traders like livestock. In the cabin, naked slaves, wearing chains on their hands and feet, were densely packed in the low cabins, barely maintaining a lying or half-sitting position. They had to maintain such a painful posture for two months in this damp, hot, crowded cabin full of excrement and vomit before disembarking again. The blood and sweat stains left by the previous slaves had penetrated deeply into the planks of the cabin, and it smelled of fear and despair.
One in five people will die on the way, and the bodies will be thrown directly into the sea. Those who are physically fit will survive the journey and will be sold to various plantations. There, what awaits them is the fate of working day and night until death. Until slavery was gradually abolished in U.S. states, few people had the opportunity to regain their freedom.
On slave ships, negroes were stuffed in the cabins like cargo
If there is anything different between the protagonist of our story and other slaves, it is that he is the son of a king in Africa. Or, in the words of the Europeans, a prince.
Between 1751 and 1776, Ibrahima Sori's father used war to establish a kingdom of about 100,000 square kilometers in West Africa, about the size of what is now Portugal. As heir to the kingdom, Saury began to learn various languages and the agricultural and military knowledge needed to rule the country from an early age. He learned four african local languages from an early age. In addition, as a member of the royal family of a Muslim country, he was fluent in reading and writing Arabic.
At the age of 26, Saury went out to fight with two thousand cavalrymen. Saury successfully defeated the enemy, but encountered an ambush on the way home. In the confusion, he and several soldiers around him were taken captive by the enemy.
The captives were sold to European slave traders who watched like vultures on the coast of West Africa. Saury is not qualified to condemn such acts, as his country has also been selling captured captives to Europeans. Only then will they be able to obtain the guns and gunpowder of the Europeans and win the next war.
Saury and several of his soldiers were sold on the same slave ship. Of course, the distinction between a prince and a soldier now completely does not exist. In the eyes of Europeans, they are just the same talking cattle. There is no difference other than age and physical differences.
Whatever gifts fate had given him—wealth, power, royal blood—at this moment, fate had ruthlessly taken them all back. Like the other slaves, Sorrie, handcuffed and ankleted, curled up in the dark cabin below deck. For the next two months, they will all be forced to maintain such a posture.
In 1776, on a slave ship of the Dutch East India Company, a merchant felt that the environment below the deck was too harsh and would lead to the mass death of slaves. So he advised the captain to untie the slaves' ankles and allow them to move on deck. The captain agreed.
The slaves, who had the opportunity to come to the deck, soon seized the opportunity to kill a group of crew members and take control of the entire ship. The merchant who suggested untying the slaves was one of the first to be killed.
In the aftermath of this incident, all the sailors on all other slave ships categorically refused to grant any form of freedom to the slaves under deck. It is better to suffocate a few more slaves than to lose your own life. For the slaves under the deck, whether they survived the next trip alive could only rely on their own bodies and will.
Sorrie survived. The slave ship arrived on a caribbean island two months later, and after several transfers of hands, Saury was taken to a city along the Mississy Called Natchez. Here, Saury and other slaves were brought to the market for sale. Eventually, a farmer named Thomas Foster bought Saury and another slave. He was very satisfied with the strong physique of the two black slaves, and thought that they could endure long hours of labor in the fields.
Foster was not wealthy, and could even be said to be very poor on hand. He came to Natchez city only because the municipality here distributed land free of charge to all whites who wished to settle down. After receiving the free land, he also needed to buy slaves to cultivate the land. So Foster borrowed money from someone else to buy the two slaves.
After buying two slaves, Foster led them home with chains. In terms of education alone, Foster is far inferior to the African prince who followed him. On this continent, however, the color of their skin determines who can ride on horseback and who wears chains around their necks.
Despite the language barrier, Sorrie knew he had been sold to the white man. After arriving at Foster's house, Saury tries to tell Foster through other blacks that his father was a king of Africa. If he were sent back to Africa, his king father would be able to compensate Foster for ten times as much damage.
Saury's words only drew ridicule from everyone, and no one believed that he was really a prince from Africa. Just as Foster hadn't named him yet, he simply named Saury the Prince.
At first, Saury refused to work in the fields, which was not what a man of his stature should do. Foster wasn't surprised. The vast majority of black slaves would do some futile resistance before accepting their tragic fate. The leather whip will make them accept reality faster. Once there were black slaves who protested by hunger strikes, and slave owners knocked off their front teeth and forced the porridge out of their mouths.
In the end, they will all accept their new identities and obediently go to work in the fields. Without exception.
Saury was beaten again and again, but he refused to give in. A few days later, he took a chance to escape. Foster quickly recruited a full-time slave hunter to track down Sauerry's whereabouts, but found nothing. Foster regretted not taking good care of the slave, which was a considerable loss of property for him.
Saury knew that someone would come and take him back, so he ran to the forest on the mountain and hid. But the joy and excitement of escaping was soon replaced by fear and uneasiness. Saury realized that he could only cross the ocean to return to his homeland in a white ship, and that white people here could never let a black man get on their boat casually. After a few days of hiding in the mountains, it became increasingly difficult to even find food to survive.
There were only two paths in front of him: either continue to hide in the mountains until they starved to death or froze to death; Or take the initiative to go back to the place where he had just fled a few days earlier.
Two weeks later, when Saury walked out of the forest again, he had completely abandoned any idea of returning to his old life. He decided to accept the fate of the arrangement and live as a slave on this strange continent. What awaits him will be decades of humiliation and toil, but he can at least live.
On this day, Mrs. Foster was sitting at home doing needlework when she suddenly saw a tall black man at the door. She recognized that this was the slave who had just escaped two weeks earlier. The slave went up to her and lay down, then put her feet around her neck. In West Africa, such a gesture implies absolute obedience.
Foster was relieved to see the escaped slave running back on his own, and he was fretting over how to pay off the debt he had owed for the slave's purchase. He graciously dispensed with Sorrie's whipping punishment and ordered him to go to work in the fields at once. The year was 1788.
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Once he accepted his slave status, Sauerry's mentality changed subtly. When a person's life is completely controlled by another person, he will try his best to please the master and strive to enhance his value in the eyes of the master. Sorrie offered to suggest that Foster change the crops in the field from tobacco to cotton for higher yields. In Saury's hometown, cotton is a very important crop, and he knows everything about growing cotton.
Foster listened to Sauerry's advice. With Sory's help, his farmland produced 16,000 pounds of cotton in its first year. After earning the proceeds, Foster bought more land and slaves. Soon he became a manor owner with 1,700 acres of land and 40 black slaves. Foster admired Sauerry's knowledge and skills, arranged for him to manage the black slaves on the estate as a foreman, and married a slave girl named Isabella.
In the blink of an eye, more than a decade has passed. Saury went from a 26-year-old to a middle-aged man in his forties. He had fully adapted to life as a black slave. If there were no accidents, he would probably spend the rest of his life in Foster's estate.
But fate, in addition to liking to let people fall from a high place when they are proud, also likes to tease a person with a looming hope when his heart is like stagnant water.
One day, when Saury went to the market to sell produce, he found himself seeing the face of a white man he had known. The man was an Irish doctor named John Cox. 26 years ago, Cocos used to be a surgeon on a British sailing ship. On one voyage, when his ship docked off the coast of West Africa, Cocos disembarked and went ashore to hunt. As a result, he got lost on shore and failed to return to the ship on time. The ship, which was parked on the shore, finally left without waiting for Cocos.
The lost Dr. Cocos ended up passing out in the wilderness. When the local Africans discovered the white man, they sent him to the king. And this king was Saury's father. Under the meticulous care of the Saury family, Dr. Cocos quickly recovered. He then spent another 6 months in the palace before leaving Africa on a European ship.
Cocos and Saury, two people of different nationalities, different skin colors, and different identities, continued their respective life trajectories after saying goodbye. What are the chances that two such people will meet exactly halfway away twenty years from now without prior agreement? Without God's arrangement, the answer would be infinitely close to zero by a number.
However, Dr. Cocos decided to emigrate to the United States, completely unaware of Saury's whereabouts, and then, out of hundreds of towns across the Country, he chose natchez by mistake. When Dr. Cox recognized Saury, who had been sold into slavery, at the market, he embraced him excitedly, ignoring the disgusted glances of the others.
When he said goodbye to the Saury family 26 years ago, Dr. Cocos said that he did not know how to repay the Saury family for their kindness to him. But when he and Sory embraced again, he knew. God brought him to this small city on the banks of the Mississippi River to save the African prince. Cocos decides to pay for Saury's redemption from his master and find a ship to send him back to his african homeland to repay the Saury family's kindness 26 years ago.
At first, Cocos thought it was just a matter of money. When he and Saury arrived at Foster's manor, he realized that things were not so simple.
Dr. Cocos politely asked Foster how much it would cost the black slave, nicknamed the Prince, to buy it. Foster replied that the slave was not for sale.
Cocos explained that his purpose was not to buy a slave, but to repay the black slave's family for the help they had given him. To show his sincerity, he simply offered a high price of $1,000. But Foster was unmoved, replying that no matter how much money was paid, the slave was not for sale. For Foster, Sauerry was not an ordinary black slave, but a labor manager and cotton grower on the estate. In a way, Foster relied on Sorrie's ingenuity to make him what he is today.
Dr. Cocos left Foster's estate in disappointment, but he did not give up easily. In order to get Saury back to freedom, he thought of many ways, and even found the governor of Mississippi. But the governor told him that if Foster wasn't willing to sell, there was no way for anyone to set the slave free. In the United States, private property is protected by law.
Nine years later, until Dr. Cocos died, he could not free Saury. He entrusted the matter to his son in his hospital bed and passed away with regret.
The year was 1816. It has been 28 years since Saury was trafficked to the United States.
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Dr. Cocos's son continues to work for Saury's freedom, but Foster still coldly rejects all offers.
Although Saury was not able to regain his freedom directly, thanks to the efforts of the Cocos fathers and sons, many people heard that there was a black slave in Foster's manor who was a prince from Africa. A reporter named Marschalk sniffed the selling point in this story. He found Sauerry while he was out on an errand and found that the slave could indeed read and write Arabic as rumored to have been.
Marshak decided to make a big news out. He persuaded Sori to write a letter to his family in Arabic, then gave a lengthy account of the matter and forwarded the letter to a senator. In this era, there are very few African countries that Americans can say. So the senator who received the letter took it for granted that since Sori was African and spoke Arabic, it should probably be Moroccan. So the senator gave the letter to the U.S. Embassy in Morocco, and the ambassador forwarded it to Sultan Abdul Rahman of Morocco. When the Sultan heard of this, he felt disgraced and contacted the President of the United States to demand the release of the enslaved Moroccan.
This time, things were really big. With the intervention of the President of the United States, Foster was finally forced to agree to let Sauery leave his estate. But he also put forward an additional condition: Saury must leave the United States as soon as he is freed. Foster could not accept that the former black slave was breathing the air of American freedom with himself on an equal footing.
The year was 1828. Saury was trafficked to the United States for his 40th year.
After meeting Dr. Cocos and once again igniting the flame of hope for freedom, Saury waited a full 21 years to get rid of his slave status. Once a young prince in his twenties, he has now become a 66-year-old.
After regaining his freedom, Sauerry did not leave the United States as soon as Foster had requested. He wanted to raise money to buy his wife and children from Foster and return to Africa with his family. With the help of reporters, he quickly raised $200 and set his wife free.
But it is not so easy to redeem his children and grandchildren. He and Isabella have nine children together, and with the addition of grandchildren, there are many more people. To buy them all, you need a lot of money.
Saury decided to use the curiosity of the American people to go to different cities to tell their stories and ask for donations to free their children.
Saury traveled north along the Mississippi River, meeting with local political and business people every time he reached a city and asking them to donate money for his family. Sori knows how to cater to the curiosity of others, and he cleverly says nothing about the fact that he is not a Moroccan citizen. He even brought a set of Moroccan court-style costumes to satisfy all the imaginations of a Moroccan prince.
Once, an American who wanted to spread Christianity in Africa took out a prayer and asked Sori to translate it into Arabic. In order to be able to get donations, Saueri did so. However, it was discovered many years later that the Devout Muslim wrote in Arabic not as a translation of the Christian prayer, but as part of the beginning of the Qur'an.
It is written in Arabic by Saury
In the past six months, Sori has traveled to many cities and even met the president of the United States himself, but he has not been able to scrape together enough money to redeem his family. At this point, Foster began to accuse Saueri of not abiding by the agreement to leave the United States immediately. If Saury does not leave, he will revoke the freedom he has been given.
A portrait of Sauerry after regaining his freedom
In desperation, Saury was forced to leave the United States with his wife and two people. In March 1829, Saury and his wife arrived in Liberia in North Africa on a boat. (A separate article on the relationship between Liberia and the United States will need to be clarified.)
After 41 years, Saury is finally back in Africa. He plans to redeem all his children in the United States after he has collected the money, and then return to his hometown in West Africa. However, after a journey across the Atlantic, the 67-year-old Saury's body has become very weak. Four months later, the old man died after a high fever. Even to his death, he never returned to the land where he had set foot in his homeland again, nor did he see his children again.
Sauerry's former master, Foster, also died that year. Sauerry's children were divided up as a legacy by Foster's sons. His wife, Isabella, had just enough money to redeem the freedom of their two sons and bring them to Liberia. Sauerry's remaining sons and grandchildren were taken as slaves by Foster's sons to their newly acquired estates, where they have been scattered throughout the United States.
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Friends interested in the topic of slavery in the United States can continue reading this article: How White Slave Owners in the United States Destroyed Black Slaves