The yacht, originally intended as one of the most beautiful and luxurious crafts ever built, was bought by southern planters, loaded with zinc tanks and retrofitted with new decks so that nearly 500 enslaved people could be “tight packed” into a craft meant to hold no more than 140.
The stories of these people and their subsequent lives on southern plantations will be highlighted in “‘Where I Come From . . .’: The Wanderer Enslaved and Their Descendants,” an all-day symposium organized by Valerie Babb, director of the Institute for African American Studies and professor of English and of African American studies. The symposium will take place on May 15 at the Georgia Museum of Art and is free and open to the public. The event will conclude with a tour of the exhibition “Face Jugs: Art and Ritual in 19th-Century South Carolina” led by Dale Couch, curator of decorative arts, and a reception. For more information, please contact the Institute for African American Studies at 706.542.5197.
“It’s kind of just serendipity, in a way, that she happened to contact him and he happened to tell her, ‘oh no, they’re created by Congolese slaves, who had been brought here and their descendants just kept on doing this,’” Babb says.
The jugs were meant to keep away evil and were sometimes used as funeral grave markers.
Babb says, “They became
items that were treasured by families. Luckily, the Georgia Museum of Art
decided to have this exhibition, and it dovetailed very nicely with the
symposium.”
Besides illuminating the story of the Wanderer, Babb hopes the symposium will begin a series of collaborations among the Institute for African American Studies, the larger University of Georgia and Jekyll Island, which currently has a memorial where the ship landed that it aims to expand.
“I think it is a really good balance of audiences,” Babb says. “It’s a nice blend between the academic, the artistic and actual life.”
