The African Slave Jabari Mansa: The Forbidden Story America Tried to Erase Forever
The African Slave Jabari Mansa: The Forbidden Story America Tried to Erase Forever In the summer of 2019, demolition crews in Bowford County, South Carolina tore down the remains of an antebellum plantation house whose walls had held nearly two centuries of secrets. Behind one rotted beam, wrapped in layers of brittle oilcloth, workers found a folded letter written in 1831 by a plantation overseer named Edmund Hail. The handwriting was faint but unmistakably legible, the contents deeply unsettling. “There is a negro here,” Hail wrote, “who knows things he should not know.” He described a man who “speaks of events before they happen,” a man “with eyes that see through time itself,” a man Hail admitted he feared more than “any living thing.” The enslaved man was listed in plantation ledgers under the generic name “Jim.” But cross-referenced records now identify him as Jabari Mansa, a Wolof man stolen from West Africa in 1807. What Hail hid in that wall was not a confession of superstitio...