Legacy of the Sacred Harp

Epilogue

Legacy of the Sacred Harp 226 ePILOGUe the next years passed as rapidly as if a steady breeze were turning pages of the calendar. Doug’s work took us from Georgia to California before we built a home in Arizona to retire. To be near grandchildren, we eventually returned home to Texas, only minutes from the waiting room where this story began. Clara Dumas, Reverend Dumas’s widow, has become a close friend over the years. Clara, her daughter, Pam, and her grandson, Brian, drove from their home in Granite Quarry to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to take a pan of brownies to my grandson, Sergeant Colin Arden, before his first deployment to Iraq. Reverend eric Leake had long ago completed his master’s and doctoral degrees, and was now pastor of Martin Temple African Methodist episcopal Zion Church of Chicago, Illinois. All the while, Doug and I traveled to every Sacred Harp singing we could manage—from the West Coast to the east Coast, and even to england and Wales. Genealogical searches to discover family roots have proliferated around the world. One such search that might predictably have led only to a dead end has found resolution with a slave’s story that has come full circle. Joseph Opala, the anthropologist in the story of the Gullah melody and now a professor of history at James Madison University in Virginia, helped connect the dots through seven generations. The winter 2007 issue of American Legacy, the Magazine of African-American History & Culture told of a slave named Priscilla, who had been kidnapped in 1756 at the age of ten in her native Sierra Leone, died in 1811 on the Comingtee Plantation in South Carolina, which retained extensive records. In 2006, one of Priscilla’s descendants, Thomalind Martin Polite, a speech therapist in Charleston, South Carolina, traveled to Sierra Leone for a bittersweet homecoming “to take [Priscilla’s] spirit back to her resting place.” Truth, once assumed lost in time, is being revealed. As the four hundredth anniversary of Jamestown approached, news of activities relating to the upcoming 2007 observation held my attention. The Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Project, which excavated the original 227 colonial fort, brought a major rethinking of the accounts of England’s first permanent settlement in North America. The fort itself had been thought to have been washed away by the James River. But the discovery, following a long-held hunch of archaeologist William kelso, of the true location of James Fort has amazed the world. Literally inches below the visible surface, beneath a layer of Civil War embattlements and commemorative statues of John Smith and Pocahontas, kelso and his archaeological team unearthed evidence of the fort that was incredibly built under the hurried and harsh conditions we have not previously appreciated. The fort was then was abandoned and inexplicably lost during Jamestown’s first struggling decades. James Fort still retains much of its original structure, including palisade walls, bulwarks, interior buildings, a well, and a warehouse. The fort is triangular-shaped with circular bulwarks at each corner where the palisades meet—exactly as William Strachey, secretary of the Sea Venture voyage, had described it: “The fort . . . about half an acre . . . is cast almost into the form of a triangle and so palisaded. The south side next the river . . . contains 140 yards, the west and east sides a hundred only. At every angle or corner, where the lines meet, a bulwark or watchtower is raised and in each bulwark a piece or two well mounted . . . And thus enclosed, as I said, round with a palisade of planks and strong posts, four feet deep in the ground, of young oaks, walnuts, etc. . .” extensivepreparations planned for morethanadecadebytheAssociation of the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA) promised a momentous, unforgettable year-long anniversary celebration. Queen elizabeth II would be present in early May to mark the occasion, as she had done for the 350th observation fifty years earlier. A new facility, the Archaearium, was constructed to exhibit artifacts from the James Fort excavation. The majority of the artifacts, which numbered nearly a million, dated to the times of Queen elizabeth I and king James. On November 10, 2007, Richmond would be the site of the James River Sacred Harp Convention for their annual singing and dinner on the ground. The combination was irresistible. Our son Michael gifted us with two weeks at his time-share condominium in nearby Williamsburg. Because I’d been following reports of new discoveries pictured on the APVA...