“Antoney, Negro, and Isabell, Negro” is how they were known in the 1625 ledger of Captain William Tucker of Elizabeth City, Virginia. In all likelihood, they also had African names only the ages know now. They may have been baptized shortly after birth, and their anglicized names conferred then by Portuguese priests who’d ventured deep into the interior of Angola, where Catholicism was well established by the 16th century.
Or, Portuguese priests may have performed obligatory baptisms and christenings of these two young people as they were herded into the hold of the São João Bautista, a Portuguese slave ship at anchor in Luanda Bay off the coast of Angola, in the late central-African rainy season of 1619. Let’s call them Anthony and Isabella, for our narrative. Two among the “20. and odd Negroes” Sir John Rolfe recorded aboard the Dutch man-of-war White Lion, lying at anchor on August 20, 1619, at the mouth of the James River off Point Comfort.
Anthony and Isabella carried within them the germinal cells of the first Black child born in America, though on that fateful day in August 1619 they probably did not know that, nor did they know his name. Nor could they have known that symbolically they also carried within them the germinal cells of Scipio and Crispus and Nat and Sojourner and Maggie and Frederick and Booker T. and W.E.B. and Marcus and Langston and Duke and Yardbird and ’Trane and Malcolm and Martin and Rosa and Barack and Trayvon and Eric and Breonna and George… and me… and countless millions who, in some measure or part, were torn, like them, from Africa’s soil.
Anthony and Isabella stepped from the decks of the White Lion into a pinnace, bobbing in the surf off Point Comfort, Virginia; a small boat that would carry them to the White planters and merchants and colonists waiting ashore, men who had just determined their worth in terms of salted meat and vegetables and grain and the other provisions needed by the captain of the White Lion. What they did not know then, could not know then, is that in being handed over to these men, they were about to embark on a journey of unimaginably epic proportions; a heroic journey in which, during their lives, they would endure great hardships and privations; a symbolic journey that would see their work lay the foundation of the economics, politics, religion, medicine, education, industry, law enforcement, and technology of a new nation; and, a hard-earned journey that would generate great power and wealth for some that, sadly, Anthony and Isabella, and those like them, for the most part, would never share.