The imagination of historian Daniel L. Schafer was haunted upon first hearing, in 1975, the legend of Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, an African princess who married an East Florida planter, bore several children and, once emancipated, become an imperious plantation slaveowner who bought and sold land, sued whites and played a central role in a community of free blacks.
It was a legend, right? Could there really have been a woman who led such an unparalleled life?
Schafer immediately set about finding out, visiting the Kingsley Plantation repeatedly over the next several months. He talked to local historians, frequented regional libraries, archives and courthouses, then traveled in search of further evidence of the Kingsley legends — along the Atlantic Coast, from the West African nations of Guinea and Senegal to St. Thomas, Guinea, the Dominican Republic and England — and came to separate tale from fact, raising the story of this very real and unique woman from the broader histories of the African Diaspora.
As part of the Florida Conversations series, Schafer discusses the life of Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley in a lecture presented at the USF Downtown Center at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 4.
Professor of history at the University of North Florida, Schafer is the author of five books and more than 25 articles on such topics as Florida's British period (1763-1784), St. Augustine, plantation life, African-American history and the Civil War.
His lecture is followed by a reception and signing of his book Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner (University Press of Florida, 2003), which draws upon his extensive research in documenting Anna's life.
Anna was a teenager when captured in her homeland of Senegal and sold into slavery in 1806. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., a planter and slave trader from Spanish East Florida, bought her in Havana, Cuba, and took her to his St. Johns River plantation in northeast Florida, where she soon became his household manager, wife and eventually mother of four of his children. Emancipated in 1811, she became the owner of her own farm and 12 slaves the following year.
For the next 25 years, life on her farm and at the Kingsley plantation on Fort George Island was tranquil, but when Florida passed from Spanish to American control, and racism and discrimination increased in the territory, Anna and her children migrated to a colony in Haiti established by her husband as a refuge for free blacks.
Then, amid the spiraling racial tensions of the antebellum period, Anna returned to north Florida, where she fought to maintain her fortune as a free woman of color in a patriarchal society ruled by whites.
The book is presented well, rich in detail and reveals much about the history of our state.
The USF Downtown Center is located at 1101 Channelside Drive, Tampa (813-905-5858).
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2004.