Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. 

In 1787, 55 white men met in Philadelphia, to create the document that would become the framework for how the United States would be governed. Of those 55, Just under half enslaved human beings. At the time, five of the 13 states had begun the process of gradually abolishing slavery. Although the word slave does not appear in the Constitution, the institution of slavery was certainly on the minds of the framers. Among the compromises that they made around slavery, which included the infamous three fifths clause, was one regarding the transatlantic slave trade. In effect, they punted the issue. Article One, Section Nine of the United States Constitution, titled, "Powers Denied Congress," states, "The migration or importation of such persons, as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress, prior to the year 1808." By that date, nearly two decades after the Constitution was ratified, popular sentiment had changed, at least regarding the transatlantic slave trade, and on March 2, 1807, President Thomas Jefferson, himself an enslaver, signed into law An Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which went into effect on the earliest possible date, January 1, 1808. The law, of course, did not stop the thriving domestic slave trade, which has been estimated as generating $3 to $6 million annually in trade revenue. It also didn't completely eliminate the involvement of United States citizens and United States ships in the transatlantic slave trade. In 1819, Congress passed legislation, modified in 1820, which deemed the transatlantic slave trade to be piracy, and which set the penalty for participation as death, although only one person was ever executed for the crime. 

Despite the long-standing prohibition, and severe penalty for breaking the law, the last slave ship landed in the United States a full four decades after it was classified piracy, in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. The timing wasn't mere coincidence. After the United States began to come apart at the seams over the expansion of slavery into the western territories, some militant enslavers in the south, dubbed "the fire eaters," agitated for a resumption of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1856, aboard the steamboat, William Jones, Jr, a group of men, led by the boat's captain, Timothy Meaher, made a bet that kidnapped Africans could be smuggled into the United States, despite the ban.  Meaher hired his Alabama neighbor, William Foster, to captain the voyage. Foster’s schooner, the Clotilda, built in 1855, was designed to carry cargo, with two masts and a nearly seven foot deep hold.  Whether or not Foster designed the ship with human cargo in mind, he agreed to the scheme, and Meaher found buyers for the kidnapped Africans they planned to smuggle.  On March 4, 1860, Foster and his crew set out for Africa. Unlike Foster, the crew wasn’t aware of the nefarious goal of the ocean crossing, and upon landing on an island off the coast of Africa, they mutinied. With the promise of double wages, Foster convinced them to continue the trip.  In Africa, they purchased 110 Africans, who had been forcibly kidnapped from Tarkar, a town in Yorubaland, in what is now southwest Nigeria. The residents of Tarkar had been attacked by soldiers from the Dahomey Empire, who then marched them for two weeks to the port city of Ouidah, in what is now Benin.  

For 13 days, the terrified Africans, most of whom were under 20 years old and many of whom had likely never before seen the sea, were smuggled across the ocean on the Clotilda, kept in the hold of a ship that usually held crops like cotton and sugar. 110 human beings were confined in a space 23 feet long and ranging from eighteen to 23 feet wide. Adding to their trauma, the imprisoned Africans were forced to travel naked.  Upon reaching Alabama, the ship was towed up Mobile Bay, and after everyone disembarked the Clotilda was set on fire to hide the evidence of the crime. Even so, the smuggling was an open secret in Mobile, but the perpetrators were never tried for their act of piracy.  The Africans were split up and sold off, with no effort made to keep family members together. Scattered throughout Alabama, the enslaved were forced into hard labor.   When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect two and a half years later, on January 1, 1863, the Clotilda survivors were freed in theory but not in fact. 

For most of the survivors it wasn’t until after the defeat of the Confederacy at the end of Civil War that they were finally liberated, and even then for some their practical situations did not change much, as they were forced by circumstances to continue to work for low wages for their former enslavers.  Some 30 of the shipmates, though, saved every penny they had and worked together to buy a property near the mouth of the Chickasabogue River, creating a community they called African Town after their beloved homeland where they yearned to return. The community, now known as Africatown, still stands and its residents include around 100 descendants of the Clotilda survivors. In 2012 the Africatown History District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  In January 1940, Matilda McCrear died in Selma, Alabama. McCrear, who arrived in Alabama on the Clotilda at the age of 2, was the last known US survivor of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.    Nearly 80 years later, in May 2019, researchers announced that they had found the wreckage of the Clotilda in the Mobile River, near 12 Mile Island. The Alabama Historical Commission, with funding from the state of Alabama has undertaken a project of excavation, and pieces of the recovered Clotilda are now on display at Africatown Heritage House, which is operated by the History Museum of Mobile.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Joining me now is historian Dr. Hannah Durkin, author of, "The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade."

Hi, Hannah, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Hannah Durkin  11:00  
Hi. Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:03  
Yes. So I would love to hear how you came to write this book about the survivors of the Clotilda. 

Dr. Hannah Durkin  11:10  
Yeah, so I was actually working on a slightly different project. So I was researching the films and writing of  Zora Neale  Hurston. Now, Hurston was possibly the first Black woman to hold a camera professionally, hold a film camera. So she was a really important ethnographic filmmaker. And she she filmed one of the survivors of the Clotilda, a man named Cudjo Lewis or Kazzoola. And so I was writing about that. But I also wanted to see if I could identify other people in her film footage. So I was looking at this early version of her ethnographic memoir, "Mules and Men." I don't think it was published until about maybe 50 years after she wrote it. And actually no, it wasn't discovered until 50 years after she wrote it. It was published finally in 2001, so when she died in 1960, so quite a long time of her death. So I was looking in that. And I noticed in the appendix of that book, one of the appendices, it lists the names of her interviewees. So I was going through that, and suddenly, I realized that she mentioned that she'd interviewed an African woman, and I realized this African woman must have been the woman that she referred to in a letter to Langston Hughes, in which she talks about meeting another Clotilda survivor. She describes her as "most delightful." Those are her words. She also says,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     "But no one will ever know about her but us; she is a better talker than Cudjo." So, Cudjo Lewis. So historians have rightly assumed that we could never know who this woman was. And then I had this name, Sallie Smith, obviously a very, very common name. So it said that she lived on a different river from where she lived, it said that she had a son, not a daughter, so lots of sort of misdirection in this letter to Langston Hughes. But it was enough for me to sort of narrow that down. And I just kept searching and searching. It gave me enough material to write an article, and then shortly after to publish the article, a newspaper of digitized newspaper appeared online that showed that actually, there was a woman who outlived Sallie Smith or to give her a West African name, Redoshi. So then there was another article, and then it sort of spiraled into a book basically. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:15  
So I want to hear a little bit more about this, you know, sort of digging for clues investigating. It's almost like a mystery to solve, finding all of these survivors. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the process of doing that and the different kinds of sources you needed to consult?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  13:31  
Absolutely. So the most important was some of the most important sources, of course, were genealogical records, so census data that might identify persons as African born. Of course, that doesn't tell you that they were Clotilda survivors. So I was going through all these and sort of matching up all these different, it's, I guess, census records, death records, and, and also looking online. So I've benefited so much from digitized newspaper and magazine sources. So I'm not sure that you could have done this kind of research very easily 10 or 20 years ago, but it was, yeah, basically uncovering more magazine and newspaper interviews with Clotilda survivors, or people who were identified as African born. A lot of the time, in fact, almost all the time, they weren't the name of the slave ship was never mentioned. So it was quite hard to be sure if they were Clotilda survivors. So again, there's a lot more misdirection in the archival material. And it seemed like, certainly, on some occasions, either the interviewer or the journalist who writes it assumes that it's a Wanderer survivor. So the Wanderer was the the penultimate US slave ship that landed off the coast of Jekyll Island, Georgia, what 19 months before the Clotilda, in about November, 1858. So yeah, there was a lot of misdirection basically, but I was just putting lots and lots of information together. And of course, descendants and other researchers were very helpful too. They shared material. They, in fact, wanted to contact me out of the blue with an oral history recorded by the grandson of a Clotilda survivor. This was all taken down in 1984. And there was another family reached out to me via the Clotilda Descendants Association, which is the the organization that works to, you know, memorialize, commemorate, and make sure that, we would remember the Clotilda survivors. And they contacted me, and they'd have this sort of family history book, and their ancestor died in 1883. So to keep this history was quite amazing, and it all matched up. So I was able to identify, confirm that this that their ancestor was a Clotilda survivor by matching it with archival information I had, and that meant that the Clotilda Descendants Association accepted them as as descendants, so they were able to join the organization. So that is wonderful things in that sense. But of course, as you as you were saying, the material was so fragmentary. In most cases, it was a case of putting things together. And also being very mindful of the fact that although it was extremely fragmentary, there is almost no, almost no records of, in particular women survivors of the Middle Passage. So beyond the Clotilda survivors, historians have documented a couple of narratives from page long narrative from Barbados. It's a petition from Massachusetts, and also this full page memoir from Jamaica. And of those four documents, only two of them mentioned the Middle Passage, and only one of them does so in any detail. That's the full page memoir. So when you're looking for testimonies of women, Middle Passage survivors,  that's certainly in the English language. There might be in a, you know, there might be Brazilian documents, for example. But looking at the English speaking American hemisphere, then that's all all there is, which is terrible. But it made me realize just how important the Clotilda survivors' stories were.

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:09  
So let's talk a little bit about the Clotilda itself. And for context, right, the transatlantic slave trade is abolished by the United States in 1808. Very early on, there's of course, that thriving domestic slave trade still going on. And then it's, I believe, a capital crime in 1820. And we're talking about 1860s. So why do these men, these white slave traders in Alabama think that they'll get away with it? Why do they do it? Like they don't have to. That's not the only way to get slaves at this time period. So what what is going on here? What's the context for this?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  17:48  
Yeah, so as you say, so the slave trade is banned in the British Empire in 1807 and in the United States in 1808. And it's declared piracy, so it becomes a treasonous capital crime in 1820. But it's not very well policed at all. It's though it's, other nations are very slow to to stop, and in particular, African people are being trafficked to, to Brazil, and by the 1850s, it's, it's really Cuba. That's where the center of the transatlantic slave trade is, and, and, in fact, a quarter of all survivors of the Middle Passage are trafficked after 1808. So this is the transatlantic slave trade begins around 1500. So this is so a quarter landing in the fight, sort of, I guess, the final, certainly the final century of the trade, and this final 70 years, really, so. So this is something that's carrying on isn't very well policed, that there is a high demand for enslaved labor. In Cuba, in particular, the sugar industry is totally powered by this trafficking industry. So So I think it's about 71% of people trafficked to Cuba are trafficked after 1820. So if your ancestors are from, you know, Africa or Cuba, and the answer to that one, basically, if you are of African or Caribbean ancestry, it's most likely the ancestors were illegally trafficked. So what's also important to know is the fact that it's US ships in the main that were actually trafficking African people. So what that means is that there's very much an awareness that the US slave trade is carrying on. Okay, the slaves have been taken to Cuba instead of the United States. But they'd not been very well policed at all. And, and certainly the Clotilda conspiratists are very aware that there is a US slave trade and that it's, they want to profit from it. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:48  
What are the conditions then in Africa that are encouraging African people, so I think in this case, it's the Dahomeys, to kidnap the Yoruba, to bring them, to sell them? What is driving that?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  20:04  
Yeah. So basically, there's European people's hunger for enslaved labor, basically. So what happens is that the Europeans land on the African continent. And they create this sort of horrible economy in which, basically, different African communities and societies are having to trade guns for people to protect themselves, against their own people's enslavement. So you could in a cycle where you you know, you to step away from that becomes almost impossible. That's not to, that's not to justify the horrible trade in human beings, in many cases, children or young people. But it means that it's that you're so you're so you're made complicit in it. Whereas when you look at the Europeans and the Americans, the reason that's true slavery is happening simply to power economies, that slave trade is happening in the West African in West Africa, because it's a sort of dog eat dog environment. So what you get is social, you know, social instability demographic breakdown, you create these militaristic states that are dependent on a warfare rather than agriculture to to sustain themselves, basically.

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:20  
So you mentioned that there's not a lot in the English language that describes the Middle Passage, especially for women. Could you talk a little bit about what what we learn from the Clotilda survivors about that, that experience the experience of being kidnapped, of undergoing this traumatic journey, and then being in this new land where suddenly they are enslaved? Like what what do we learn from their experiences what they told to researchers?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  21:51  
Yeah, we learn so much about the, you know, the Middle Passage's human lived experience. I should have mentioned earlier, actually, that, of course, an important source in my, in my book is in Zora Neale Huston's book length interview with Cudjoe Lewis, Kazzoola, to give him his more precise African name, but what we get from the, I guess, from their specific experiences, especially when you piece them together is the the specific, the specific losses in many cases, so the separation of family members, parents from children. Of course, you learn about the specific horrors. So we know that a lot of a lot of people died during Middle Passage. So we already know about dysentery and smallpox and specific infections that people died from. But we also learn, I guess, in particular about the fact that I mean, it's, I mean, I shouldn't say that it's, it was a 45 day voyage. But we also get, okay, the facts in short snippets, but we get even accounts of seeing other people being thrown overboard the slave ships. And of course, when they have to arrive in Alabama, we know it again about the separation. And of course, we learn as well about the ways in which they work to hold on to their identities and their West African identities are so so important, and so central to their worldview, as well. They never, I mean they convert to Christianity and are extremely faithful, devoted Christians, you know. They're in they spend hours in church every Sunday. But they also, you know, determinedly, hold on to a very proud of that the African spiritual beliefs now became their identities as Africans, which of course, you know, they wouldn't have thought of themselves as Africans when they were when they lived in West Africa, but they claim as identities as important to them. Kazzoola's wife actually talks about her children being all Africans, and she's so proud of that. And, yeah, so they're just incredibly inspiring people, despite what they went through. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:04  
Let's talk a little bit about the experience as a researcher of reading these incredibly difficult passages. I mean, I was tearing up reading it, tearing up just now as you're talking about it. How do you as a researcher, do that research, protect yourself, you know, and your own well being as you're doing that?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  24:26  
Yeah, it's, I know, you do start to lose faith in human nature when you read all this. You think how can how can the you know the youngest Clotilda survivor was two years old, and she lost, I mean, when she was separate when she was sold on the West African coast, she she was separated from her two brothers. When she landed in the United States, she was separated from two of her three sisters. And so she still has a mother and one sister. But she grows up never knowing those siblings. Her mother dies in the 1870s, so it is it's so incredibly hard. And I think, I think the really, the really important thing is is, is recognizing their humanity, you know, then I guess the driving factor is giving them a voice, but it is it's hard to. Yeah. So I feel like I've read the worst of human nature, but I also read the best by reading that the voices of stories of the survivors. So it's, yeah, I think probably the I would recommend doing this kind of research in small doses. But I hate going back to read, you know, Middle Passage, reading about the passages. I hated to sort of fact- checking that chapter, that's for sure. That's the hardest bit for me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:46  
One way, of course, that the Clotilda survivors are not completely representative of other people who went through the Middle Passage is that once they got to the United States, they weren't enslaved very long. It was still terrible and traumatic, and some of them died. But it wasn't a very long period of time. Could you talk a little bit about that, and the way that they're able, perhaps, to hold on to their identity, more than others might have, because it was a relatively short period of time?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  26:14  
Yes, so one of the many horrible things about the transatlantic slave trade is that the average life expectancy of the enslaved person was about seven years, so they were in exceptionally so many worlds, and that the fact that some of them lived, the last of them lived until 1940. So now that their experiences is very unusual, that sense in the sense that they are, they land in Alabama in July, 1860. And of course, they're liberated, almost five years later. But I mean, their their experience of slavery is it's again, very harrowing. I mean, some of them are forced to work on steamboats and I found an account that showed that one of them died but you know, in December, 1860.  They fell overboard and drowned. And, of course, others were sent to work in the cotton fields for the Cotton Belt of central Alabama. So they're, you know, working horribly long days, picking 100 pounds of cotton a day. So their experience of slavery is, is, is terrible. Of course, it's, it's, it's much shorter than, than for most slave trade survivors to be sure. But certainly what's what's striking is, so they they attempt to, certainly when they, when they land in Alabama, they attempt to carry on with with that dancing culture, their traditions, but they're made to feel ashamed and made to feel that they are, quote, unquote, savages, you know, that they are not civilized, and I've talked about them, you know, resisting that. But they do sort of give up some of their, their tradition, or at least they, they don't practice them openly. So they are certainly struggling with struggling with that horrible alien environment that doesn't recognize the value at all of their, cultural tradition. But suddenly, when they're liberated, I mean, for most, for most of them, that situation doesn't change, it doesn't change very quickly. So they're still trapped in the cotton fields of central Alabama. Those who are working on the steam boats, and in around well, who are living in Mobile, they, they're forced to work for their former enslavers. They eventually managed to achieve independence by by saving money and creating their own township, which they named Africatown, which still exists today. It's known as Africatown, it's just north of Mobile. And they have this quite thriving community that grows to about two to 3000 people by the turn of the 20th century, where most people have their own businesses. So these are Black owned businesses, just a thriving, incredible economy that, you know, that they build by simply that you know, working hard, and that they're just the best gardeners. They have the reputation of being the best business people in the land. And yeah, they do so well to to look when I was speaking quite recently to a descendant of a Clotilda survivor. She was the great great granddaughter, but her father remembered his ancestor. And he was saying that she couldn't, she couldn't remember exactly what what her father was saying. But apparently her ancestor had this reputation for being a brilliant, he had a reputation of growing things. And this this reputation is, you know, it's handed down or it's it's recorded. So he's so they clearly are bringing West African corporate practices and farming practices that are helping them to thrive in this one really hostile alien environment.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:52  
I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what these stories tell us about generational trauma, generational poverty, because it's It's clear that even after they're emancipated, and they do remarkable things, but it's still a very difficult life. There's still just a lot of hardship. They don't typically live particularly long, even if it's longer than other enslaved people might have lived. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, and what the stories can teach us about that?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  30:22  
Absolutely. I mean, of course, what's remarkable about the Mobile based Clotilda survivors is that they establish their own school, and they appoint a teacher. And this school becomes a very important educational center. So the the Clotilda survivors are constantly working to help their descendants to give them the set of the best opportunities that they can. But of course, those opportunities are still incredibly limited. I mean, certainly in in the Cotton Belt of central Alabama, I mean, there's, there's, you know, there's no funding for education, there's no, there's no sort of outside sort of state funded support for the community. And of course, one thing that's very sad about Clotilda survivors is but I guess if you looked, look, for example, at Cudjoe Lewis' children, I mean, his his sons, his sons all die at quite a young age, and most of them die violently, as well. But yeah, as I mentioned, they establish their own township in Mobile, a community of them does that. But what their descendants find is that they're caught in cycles of poverty and violence that don't allow them to, to really escape that heritage. So quite horribly, you have the Ku Klux Klan, that emerges just after the Civil War to ensure that they can't ever sort of free themselves. I mean, one of the issues is you have you know, you had tenant farming, sharecropping, where people are renting out land the portion of land to to, to work in, to grow cotton on. The land, the quality of the soil degenerates every year. So what they can produce gets poorer and poorer, they can never, and of course, that land is owned by their former enslavers. So they're always caught in this economic system of bondage where the and of course you have in the early 20th century, you have horribly you have lynchings. And what's so striking about there are three lynchings that take place just outside Africatown, so close to the place that it seems as if it's a deliberate attempt to terrorize a thriving community, you know, Black community, just outside the buildings deliberately attempting to put them in a place. And so you have to see the situation as well, where there's no, I mean, it's not until about 1960 that, that residents of Africatown get indoor plumbing. The mill also, of course, paved roads and streets, and Clotilda survivors living outside Africatown, of course, they, some of them are still living in cabins in which they were enslaved. And of course, these are people living a lot of roads where, where you can never really escape that environment. And of course, you have voting rights are taken away as well. Also, they some of the Clotilda survivors managed to vote  after they achieved freedom. But that's very quickly taken away. So yeah, so there's this cycle of poverty, violence, and a lack of social mobility is just really striking and really sad.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:48  
So you're able to draw some interesting connections from the Clotilda survivors to the Civil Rights Movement, which of course, the main part of the civil rights movement that we think about is several decades after the last of the Clotilda survivors has passed away. Could you talk a little bit about those connections?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  34:08  
Yeah, absolutely. So I was really struck by those connections because they, they're the same spaces. So identify Clotilda survivors in or near to, Selma. So Redoshi, I think I mentioned who, who Zora Neale Hurston mentioned in the letter she actually befriended someone in the 1930s, she befriended a future civil rights leader. So she befriended a young woman called Amelia Boynton Robinson, that's that person. Well, that's the name she's known by. She had, she married more than once if she had a different surname, but Amelia Boynton Robinson was such an important figure in the civil rights because she, she was part of a 30 year long voting campaign in, in around Selma. And she actually invited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Selma, which really sort of instigates or really helped instigate the Selma to Montgomery marches, which of course, in turn leads to the Voting Rights Act. So this is a huge piece of legislation during the civil rights movement. So, Amelia Boynton Robinson is such an important figure there. Now, Redoshi's neighbor,  Matilda McCrear, who was the youngest Clotilda survivor at two years old, and also it's last survivor, but she died in January, 1940. Now she actually or she goes with Redoshi to meet Cudjo Lewis. It's in in December, 1931. It's the first time she's been there, either of them have been back to Mobile Bay, and to see the actual wreckage of the Clotilda and, you know, Matilda McCrear, so obviously, it's such an emotional experience for her to see, to see that ship or what's left of the ship, of course, and, and to confront the sight of the Clotilda landing and the horror that shaped her life and brought so much loss to her life, that she actually so he's so struck by this experience that she actually marches or she walks 15 miles from her rural Dallas County home to Dallas County Courthouse in Selma to basically ask for compensation for her kidnapping, enslavement. And, of course, this white judge turns her away, you know, straight away but she captured the attention of journalists. And so this this march to Dallas County Courthouse has ended up in the in the newspaper. But what's so striking about this, this courthouse is it's the same courthouse that voting rights campaigners gathered at the start of the, you know, the Selma to Montgomery marches or the summer voting rights campaign. So it's the exact same place and the the Chairman of the Board of Registrars, who turns them away when they tried to register to vote is the same man who was Matilda McCrear's landlord for for decades before that he was his father and before that, his father and so this, this is the man or the family that she labored for for decades. And what's also striking as well, so it wasn't just Selma, but I identified other groups of or another group of Clotilda survivors in and around Montgomery. And the longest lived of those survivors was a woman named Bougier More. She was actually a grown woman when she was kidnapped so she had three young children who were left behind on the West African coast. And she lost, she lost them. But she, she continues to live so when she achieves freedom, she's determined to live as a traditional Yoruba woman would, tradeswoman. So she, she is determined to to trade to trade her wares in Montgomery, so twice a week, she gathers in  mints, berries sassafrass roots around her home. So he gathers them, she forages for the wares that she can sell. She takes the train into Montgomery twice a week. And she walks along Commerce Street, which is just off on the Alabama River, she walks down Commerce Street and she walks along what is now Next Avenue market could Next Avenue. And this is demolitions whether the state call you know, capital is this is where some of her enslavers live. But it's also where Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up a seat for white, to white man, which of course then instigates the Montgomery bus boycott. So you have these really striking connections between both the Civil War and also the civil rights movement. So Bucha more lived until July, 1930. And she was able to trade up until up until about the summer of 1925. So she was invisible presence. She was a celebrity in the community, basically. Everybody knew her.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:51  
Well, it's all an incredible story. Can you tell listeners how they can get the book?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  38:56  
Yes, well, I'd be delighted that people would like to buy the book. And if they do, they can find it. The easiest way is probably to go on the HarperCollins website because that list then gives you a choice of stock kits to buy from. And of course I'm particularly highlighting bookshop.org, because if you buy through then then you can support your local independent bookshop. And if there are any listeners in the Netherlands, who would prefer to read it in Dutch, there is actually a Dutch translation. I don't think that will be on HarperCollins website, but you look for the publisher, which is Querido and get it from their website.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:32  
Excellent. I'll put links in the show notes so people can find it that way. Was there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Dr. Hannah Durkin  39:38  
Yeah, I guess the only other thing I can think to mention is perhaps that the one thing I hope that is possible from this book is that because I was identifying so many Clotilda survivors when I was writing it, I realized there must be a lot of people who don't yet know they're descended from Clotilda survivors. Matilda McCrear, she had 14 children. They didn't all survive infancy. But her grandson who's still alive, Johnny McCrear, tried to count all of her descendants. He got to about 140 and gave up. So there could be many, many descendants out there. And it gives for those who are descendants, it gives them a chance to trace certainly one line of their heritage and find out you know what their ancestor's ethnicity was. And so I hope that this might be a way for some people to be able to trace their heritage.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:32  
Well, Hannah, thank you so much for speaking with me. It was just an excellent book and I do hope people check it out.

Dr. Hannah Durkin  40:39  
Oh, thank you. It's been a wonderful experience. Thank you so much.

Teddy  41:05  
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