Culture Beat

“I looked at my hands, they were free, I looked at my feet, they were too.”

This poem sits at the feet of the Freedom! Statue on display this month as part of the Black Portland Exhibition on the sixth floor of the Glickman Library, now open to the public. Jerald E Talbot, a local civil rights leader and the first African-American to get elected to Maine legislature, inspired the African-American Collection of Maine. The statue is of a young African-American slave, his bare chest the color of chocolate with beads of sweat running down the sides of his face. His face wears a stunned expression. According to the artist’s imagination he is “being told by a breathless relative or friend that he was now a free man…no longer a slave, no longer his master’s property.”

Unconsciously, I look down at my hands holding a pen and a notebook. The slave’s face reminds me of a family tale told to me by my grandmother in Africa.

As a child growing up in Kasa’ in Congo, I heard the story of a member of my extended family being captured by the White men–“Mitumbula”–in my language, to be taken to America as a slave. He was called Nfuni Talatala Tshipela and as the first male child, according to our tradition, he was responsible for the well-being of our extended family. He was captured as he tried to free his sister from captivity. The secret beat of a drum signaled to his sister that he was coming. The sister returned with her freedom to her family but had to bear the devastating news of her brothers’ capture. The Mitumbula had stolen her brother’s freedom and my family had to live without their warrior and provider.

Through the years, in order to keep Nfuni Talatala Tshipela’s memory alive, many male children in my family, including my own brother have been named after him. While I stand in the quiet space of the library, looking up at the statue, I wonder what came of my childhood hero. Did he make it, if at all, along with the other slaves from Africa, to a shore somewhere in America? He must have longed for his family and his Africa.

I recall the songs, mostly about his bravery sung in “Thiluba”, a Kasaien language. My grandmother, Mary Jeanne Kamuanya, would retell the story with bitterness in her voice as we sat around the fire, watching her mouth form the words of the story we heard many times. We all felt the Empty Spot, the hole that his capture had left behind so many years ago.

While visiting this exhibition will not remind everyone of the disappearance of a family hero, it is still an opportunity to come to terms with a dark part of American history. The exhibit offers a rare opportunity to get a snapshot of the lives of members of the local African-American community living in Maine. Passing the statue on my way out, I wonder if my grandmother’s hero, as well as mine, ever imagined that he would be remembered many years later in Maine, USA, by a young relative, a new immigrant from Africa now calling Maine home.