A.P. story on Tracing Center visit to Cuba

Posted April 1st, 2010 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: News and Announcements Tags: Cuba, D'Wolf slave-trading, James DeWolf Perry, Katrina Browne, Tracing Center, Tulaine Marshall

The Associated Press is running a story, “US family finds traces of slave-trade past in Cuba,” about the ten-day trip to Cuba just completed by Executive Director Katrina Browne, Director of Research James DeWolf Perry, and Project Director Tulaine Marshall of the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery.

The story, written by A.P. reporter Will Weissert, focuses on the visit paid by Browne, Perry, and Marshall to the site of Mount Hope, a coffee plantation near Madruga owned by Perry’s ancestor James D’Wolf. D’Wolf was the leading slave-trader in U.S. history, sending the majority of his slaving voyages to Cuba, and he would work slaves on plantations like Mount Hope while waiting for prices in Havana’s slave market to rise.

The story begins:

James DeWolf Perry VI’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather used African slaves to grow coffee on this rocky hillside outside Havana, and to him its thorny weeds and small sugar plots feel haunted.

“Do you feel the ghost of James DeWolf out here?” asks Katrina Browne, Perry’s distant cousin.

“Yes,” he replies, drawing out the word in a long, awkward breath.

In the story, executive director Katrina Browne calls for “repair” to address the legacy of this history, adding that this tasks would be best accomplished “through more systemic efforts – public and private – to help people access the American dream.”

As Perry says at the conclusion of the article, “None of us are untouched by the legacy of slavery today.”

For more on the A.P. story and the visit to Cuba, see Perry’s blog, The Living Consequences.