By Joseph Contreras, Special to TCR
On a postcard-perfect morning under cloudless Caribbean skies, hundreds of the Christian faithful filed through the whitewashed walls of the Bethel Samaná African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church on a recent Sunday to attend a service for the ages. The overflow crowd had descended on the house of worship to commemorate a little-known episode of early 19th-century African-American history – the emigration of 300 black freedmen, emancipated slaves, and their family members in the fall of 1824 from the eastern seaboard of the antebellum United States to the seaside town of Samaná on the island of Hispaniola.
The exodus was the brainchild of AME church founder Bishop Richard Allen, and the three-hour-long service on July 21 hailed the bicentennial of that emigration. It drew AME pastors from various corners of Samaná province in the Dominican Republic’s northeast for the historic event, accompanied by their wives attired in white dresses adorned with green, black, and red sashes and green rosettes.
Their host was the Reverend Justino Rodríguez Jones, the 59-year-old pastor of Bethel Samaná and a direct descendant of those trailblazing African-American emigrants. Three shiny gold balloons spelling out the numeral 200 decorated a balustrade behind a lectern where a series of clergymen addressed the gathering.
Led by the church choir’s director, Carolina Shephard Vanderhorst, another direct descendant of those intrepid black pioneers, congregation members sang full-throated renditions of venerable Protestant hymns, some dating back 300 years or more. One was “Am I A Soldier of the Cross?” by the 18th-century English theologian and writer Isaac Watts. Later translated as “¿Soy yo soldado de Jesús?”, the catchy melody was played by a seven-man band as congregation members intoned in Spanish the chorus, “After the battle, He will crown us/God will crown us/After the battle, He will crown us/In that holy Zion.”
The main sermon was delivered by the Reverend Orlando Jones Kelly, also a descendant of the afronorteamericanos and the pastor of the Misión David AME Church in the nearby town of Las Terrenas. He read out five verses from Genesis 26 that recount the story of how Isaac and his followers, having moved some distance away from the main population of Gerar in the land of the Philistines, dug two wells – only to be challenged by local herdsmen over their rights to the water. The digging of a third well aroused no opposition from Isaac’s newfound neighbors; however, out of gratitude to the Lord, Isaac named the well Rehoboth, which means “broad places” or “room.”
It was an apposite choice for the occasion. “Our ancestors came to this island looking for a better life,” observed Reverend Jones Kelly, resplendently dressed in a white linen suit and blue-and-white stole. “They came here to till the soil, they brought the gospel of Jesus Christ, and they began to win over many people to their faith.”
The Sunday service capped a remarkable week of events, exhibitions, and expositions organized around one paramount aim: to remind AME congregation members of American ancestry about their cultural roots and the sacrifices and challenges their forefathers made and overcame two centuries ago in their new surroundings.
The Bicentennial festivities kicked off with the inauguration on July 14 of a museum to house century-old documents, jars, and other community artifacts. Daily workshops for children enrolled in the Bethel Samaná church school taught the students about their community’s history and traditional games.
A two-day gastronomic fair offered visitors traditional beverages and dishes, such as ginger beer and a cornmeal flatbread called journey cake, that the emigrants brought from their U.S. places of origin.
The Bicentennial celebrations attracted a number of scholars from abroad. They included Ryan Mann-Hamilton, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the City University of New York and a sixth-generation descendant of the afronorteamericanos. The University of Houston associate professor of comparative cultural studies, Rachel Afi Quinn, screened her hour-long documentary “Cimarrón Spirit” about the culture and beliefs of Afro-Dominican escaped slaves known as maroons.
University of Texas Ph.D. candidate Sophia Monegro discussed the living conditions facing blacks in the United States during the colonial era and the early years of the country’s independence that would fuel the exodus of thousands of African Americans to Samaná and other destinations on the island.
The Brooklyn-bred daughter of Dominican immigrants and one of the Bicentennial’s principal organizers, Monegro listed four overriding objectives of the week: the launch of the museum, disseminating knowledge about the Bicentennial itself, spreading awareness of the legacy of those African-American pioneers and how their descendants have maintained the cultural traditions that have been passed down through successive generations; and inculcating a sense of pride among the local population in their history.
“We accomplished all of those goals, and people found out they were related to people they didn’t even know about,” said Monegro. “There is an amnesia that the Dominican Republic has about its African heritage. You are told time and time again that you must not identify with blackness, so it was great to see folks embracing their African roots.”
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It all began with a letter. On December 23, 1823, Haiti’s President Jean-Pierre Boyer sent a dispatch to the commanders of the island country’s districts expressing his wish “to increase in the country the number of agriculturalists” and “augment its population with emigrants of color.”
The son of a French tailor and an African mother, Boyer had fought in the thirteen-year Haitian insurgency that eventually produced the first black-ruled sovereign nation in the Western Hemisphere in 1804, and he became its fourth chief of state in 1818. By “emigrants of color,” the mulatto president had in mind North American blacks who might be weighing the pros and cons of remaining in a country “that did not like them or leaving (for) a more comfortable place,” according to the historian Dennis R. Hidalgo.
A few months later, Boyer sent a high-ranking Haitian judge named Jonathas Granville to the U.S. to explore ways of identifying African Americans with an interest in resettlement in a country governed and overwhelmingly populated by free people of color. Granville arrived in Philadelphia on June 9, 1824, and Boyer’s emissary soon met with a number of white abolitionists and prominent members of the city’s black community, among them AME founder Richard Allen.
Granville was struck by the enthusiastic response Boyer’s initiative elicited from Allen and other members of Philadelphia’s AME community. The latter took action within days of Granville’s departure for New York: during a July 6 meeting chaired by Allen, the AME congregation founded the Haytien Emigration Society and, according to a contemporary newspaper account, unanimously approved a resolution endorsing “the proposals of President Boyer.”
The eastern Spanish-speaking part of the island declared independence from Spain in the fall of 1821. By the following February, Boyer had sent 50,000 soldiers into the former colony of Santo Domingo and annexed its territory to the Republic of Haiti. So by the time two ships bearing 300 black freedmen and emancipated slaves sailed out of Baltimore in the fall of 1824, the entire island of Hispaniola was under Boyer’s rule.
It was a symbiotic proposition from the get-go. Boyer desperately needed trained artisans and enterprising farmers to replace the large numbers of craftsmen and “agriculturalists” who had fled the violence of the Haitian insurgency and its chaotic aftermath during the first two decades of the 19th century. The ranks of the original African-American settlers included carpenters, caulkers, and blacksmiths – just the sort of skilled workers the fledgling Republic of Haiti wanted to attract.
(Boyer also hoped that an influx of U.S.-born people of color might expedite Washington’s much coveted formal recognition of Haitian sovereignty, but that would not be forthcoming until 1862, a dozen years after his death at the age of 76.)
For their part, the emigrants saw in Haiti the promise of full equality, instant citizenship, and permanent protection from white American bounty hunters looking for black freedmen to kidnap and ship to the Deep South for re-enslavement. They were also lured by Boyer’s offer of free, arable land to cultivate for their exclusive benefit.
Samaná was not the only port of call for the estimated 13,000 African Americans who migrated to Haiti during the 1820s. Others ended up in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, the future Dominican Republic capital of Santo Domingo, and Puerto Plata on the northern coast of Hispaniola.
But only the U.S.-born blacks who put down roots in Samaná and environs and their descendants managed to maintain a close-knit and self-conscious sense of community over the ensuing decades. Founded in 1756 by settlers from Spain’s Canary Islands, Santa Bárbara de Samaná – as it was originally known – was accessible only by sea throughout the 19thcentury.
Its relative isolation was conducive to the consolidation of an English-speaking enclave whose residents intermarried and kept to themselves, maintained their ties to mainstream Methodist churches, and retained the cuisine, modes of recreation, and spiritual songs of their American forebears.
That state of affairs survived the declaration of Dominican independence from Haiti in 1844 and remained the status quo for the “Americanos” of Samaná right up to the 1930s. But things began to change during the 31-year reign of the U.S.-backed dictator Rafael Trujillo. The military strongman promoted Spanish as the official language of the Dominican Republic’s public schools, and the regime discouraged public discourse in foreign tongues like English and Haitian Creole.
The building of bridges and highways during the second half of the 20th century to integrate the province of Samaná more closely with the rest of the country effectively ended the town’s enclave existence. The patois, informally known as Samaná English, began to die out with local residents born in the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the religious spirituals imported by the original emigrants were discarded or translated into Spanish.
“A unique, diverse culture developed here, and Samaná was a very intellectual town,” recalls Martha Ellen Davis, 77, a retired University of Florida anthropologist and ethnomusicologist who first came to the region as a graduate student in 1972. “About 20 percent of the population was fluent in English in the 1970s, but that link was broken with people of my generation. The identity of the samaneses might continue, but the content is being lost, and I’m seeing it happening before my very eyes.”
Wilfredo Benjamin Kelly wistfully concurs. A self-styled cultural ambassador who also traces his lineage back to the 1820s emigrants, the 50-year-old tour guide says his father perfected his English as a seafaring boat captain who sailed all over the Caribbean and conversed with Wilfredo’s grandfather Cecil exclusively in English. However, both of Wilfredo’s parents spoke to the children only in Spanish, and that remains his mother tongue to this day.
He also worries about the medium- and long-term prospects for his community’s heritage. The English spoken by his two twenty-something children is modern English, and he sees no one of his age or younger who evinces much interest in studying the history and preserving the legacy of Samaná’s afronorteamericanos. “I’m the youngest person who still speaks about our culture, but I don’t see anyone who will take my place once I’m gone,” says Benjamin Kelly. “It just doesn’t interest anyone else.”
The two enduring constants are food and the church. At Christmastime, hundreds of households bake coconut-flavored loaves of bread known as pan inglés, another edible inheritance from the 1820s emigrants. A popular dish during the gastronomy fair was pork meat served with rice, black beans, and okra – the latter a longtime staple in the African-American cuisine of the Deep South.
The AME maintains a strong presence throughout the town and surrounding province of Samaná and beyond. Three AME churches are based in the capital of Santo Domingo, and a fourth is located in the inland city of Santiago.
During Reverend Justino Rodríguez Jones’s first year as pastor of Bethel Samaná in 2016, The Christian Recorder reported an 80 percent increase in church attendance. Today, he ministers to a congregation of about 270 members, and Reverend Justino was especially gratified to have witnessed the week-long Bicentennial celebrations that ended with the joyous church service on July 21.
“Our parents and grandparents always told us about our ancestors,” said Rodríguez Jones. “For me, this has been a dream for which we have been yearning for a long time.”
