What is Known and What is Made-Up?

Determining what is true about a significant person from long ago is challenging; creating a version of that person’s life harder still.  What is real and what is speculative?  What really happened and what is made-up?  What was she really like and how can we know?  Hopefully the following will help to clarify these and related questions about my fictionalized version of Margru’s true story.



What was Margru really like?
There are eyewitness accounts of her crying during her early days in America and in the courts, there are references to her prowess as a student (especially in math), and descriptions of her work in the Kaw Mendi mission later on.  We only get her own voice in the letters she wrote while a student at Oberlin and after returning to Africa as a missionary. Since these letters are to her benefactors, I suspect they may be relatively reserved and do not give us a full sense of her personality. As a result I have had to imagine the sort of person Margru truly was: a stoical, emotional, smart, and caring person.  And I’ve had to imagine how she responded to the various circumstances and events of her life.

How do you know how old she was?
The various newspaper articles and court documents describe the girls as a variety of ages from seven to twelve, but none is definitive. For the purposes of this story, I’ve made Margru nine in 1839.

What was her real name?
According to Barber it was Margru and meant black snake while Gibbs wrote, “Man-ge-lu denotes a black snake…. Many of their names during their short residence here have assumed forms entirely inconsistent with the genius of the Mendi language. Thus Kali has become Car-le, Man-ge-lu has become Margru, etc.”  (J. W. Gibbs “On the Names of the Captured Africans,” Emancipator, 28 Nov. 1839.)  I spent several hours trying to find either Margru or one of these variations in it or “black snake” in a Mende-English dictionary without success.  Then, a couple summers ago, Konrad Tuscherer, a specialist in African history at St. Johns who has been enormously helpful to me over the years with this project, while doing research in Sierra Leone, wrote me:




I tend to refer to her as Margru as that was how she was known in the US.  Even after she took the name Sarah Kinson, Tappan insisted she use Margru since she was so well known by that name.

The Title

How did you know how to describe Mendiland?

What did you find out about her pawning?


Professor Philip Misevich of St. John’s University, a specialist in this area, was very helpful in reinforcing what I imagined of Margru’s situation in this story.

Olaudah Equiano’s description of being separated from his sister was also in my mind when imagining Margru’s mother’s response to her leaving.

What did you learn about Lomboko?
While there is nothing that specifically indicates that Margru went to Lomboko, it seems probable since most of the other captives mentioned (in Barber and elsewhere) that they were there and it was the largest slave factory in the area. For that reason, I’ve taken the liberty of assuming Margru was there too.  The information about how others were taken (kidnapped, snatched, pawned, etc.) is based on the Barber profiles.

Theophilus Conneau in A Slaver’s Log Book or 20 Years Residence in Africa provides a firsthand account of Lomboko Additional information came from Adam Jones’s From Slaves to Palm Kernels: A History of the Galinhas Country (Africa), 1730-1890.

What about those white ghosts?
I am speculating that it was first in Lomboko that Margru saw white men. As for her thinking them white ghosts, I remember going to Mende villages where the younger children, having never seen whites before, thought we were white ghosts and would shriek with terror when we came near them.   I have no idea if Margru worried about being eaten, but Cinque clearly expressed concern about this.
How did you decide to write about her Middle Passage?

There is no record of Margru’s firsthand description of her voyage from Africa to Cuba. Based on the many other accounts available I can only guess at its dreadfulness and felt it would be presumptuous of me to write about it in detail. My father, a Holocaust survivor, was not able to talk about certain things and so I imagined that Margru could not either.


What information did you have about her experience in Cuba?


I imagined the children’s responses to Havana.

“We all came to Havana in same vessel, except the three little girls and Carli* — we first saw them in Havana.” (from Cinque’s testimony in the Circuit Court trial.)  *Kale — their names are spelled in many different ways in the contemporary accounts.

What did you use to write about the rebellion?
I relied mostly on Cable for the details of the rebellion, but read of it in many of the primary sources (newspaper articles, court documents) as well. She quotes Kinna: “We feel bad, and we ask Cinque what to do. Cinque say, ‘Me think and by and by I tell you.’  Cinque then said, ‘ If we do nothing, we be killed. We may as well die in trying to be free as to be killed and eaten.” (Cable 53)

How did you decide to write about their exploration of the ship and recapture?

While I imagined their recapture from Margru’s point of view, the events are all factual.

What did you use to write about their arrival and early days in New Haven?
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for them first entering New Haven having only been briefly in Havana before.  (A friend and I made our way down to the New Haven wharf to try to imagine what this was like, but it is way too changed.)



Did they really decide to not tell much about themselves?

How did you write the scene where they look at the books with Tappan?

Were they really so scared to go to Hartford for that trial?

What is know about Margru’s experience in Hartford?

What is known about their schooling?


Do you know what Margru felt when she was with the Pendletons??



What did you learn of their time in Farmington?
Margru stayed with the Porters, the other two girls with other families, and the men in a renovated barn outside of town. All continued their schooling.  At some point during their time there, Margru took the name Sarah Kinson; I imagine that happening in Porter’s church. It is unclear if she became Christian at this time or later in Africa. She subsequently preferred her new name and reluctantly used Margru as her middle name at Tappan’s request.

What about the exhibitions and their departure?
My descriptions of the exhibitions are based on the firsthand accounts in newspapers and Sturges, A Visit to the United States in 1841.)


What is known about their return to Africa?
There is little about the crossing and so I pretty much invented that. Evidently there was a crowd when they arrived and some of the Amistads immediately left the group. (Lawson, The Three Sarahs, 11)




What is known about Margru’s time at Oberlin?

What information did you have about the men coming about her father at the end of the book?

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