Cinqué, Tall and Strong

William S. McFeely

Howard Jones has almost convinced me. He has uncovered no documentary evidence that Cinqué was in the slave trade after returning to Mende. He traces that idea to a 1953 work of historical fiction, Slave Mutiny by William A. Owens, which historians took at face value. In doing so, he has come up with an ill-fitting group of protagonists, Owens, C. Vann Woodward, Sidney Kaplan, and Samuel Eliot Morison, all of whom, unhappily, are no longer with us. To abet the villainy, Bert Wyatt-Brown, Paul Finkelman, and I were sent out in ski masks.	1
Vann Woodward, who needs no defense in this journal, did indeed repeat the charge of slave trading in his 1969 presidential address to our organization but, when unable to find documentary confirmation of the fact, deleted it from the published version. This was an act of academic integrity. The point of his inclusion of the reference in the first place was simply to show that even the most admirable of persons can change stripes. Analogous is Woodward's failure to soften Tom Watson's latter-day evil ways when writing of the onetime Populist's commendable stands of the 1890s.	2
Sidney Kaplan was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and a champion of African American causes and culture. Kaplan and his wife Emma Nogrady Kaplan made their home in Northampton, Massachusetts, a northern outpost of the civil rights movement; every good radical could be counted on to stop by at some point. Sidney and Emma had been the first to publish a comprehensive study of depiction of African Americans in paintings.1 If Sidney, who had few, had a fault, it is that he managed to see past, or somehow to disclaim, almost any flaw in a black hero. He was incensed by the accusation that Cinqué traded in slaves, and his inquiry to Owens had as its aim disproving the charge.	. . .