Ethnohistorical Study of the Kingsley Plantation Community

Jackson, Antoinette; Burns, Allan; Department of Anthropology, University of Florida-Gainesville

The community of the Kingsley Plantation is a stark and haunting story of the African Diaspora. Jackson points out that Kingsley was someone who was quite proud about his occupation as a slave trader and spoke quite directly about it even to anti-slavery interviewers in the 1840s. He was a person of complex paradoxes. While he was English, he also swore allegiance to South Carolina, Denmark, and Spain throughout his life. He was a slave owner who married Anta Majigeen Ndiaye, a woman from a Senegalese royal family. Kingsley purchased her in Cuba and brought her to Florida where both of them lived on the Kingsley Plantation. In 1837 Anta and Zephaniah Kingsley left Florida and settled in Haiti. Their descendants are multiracial and multi-national, spreading throughout the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The Kingsley Plantation is today a National Park, a protected and celebrated place on the outskirts of the industrial Jacksonville north of the downtown. Huge naval ships slide out to the ocean from the nearby base; barges, container ships, and a few fishing boats ply the waters nearby. Kingsley plantation seems like an island in the midst of this world of noise, a sea filled with churning water and pollution, and industrial might. A few people local to the area still fish off the bridges that span the St. Johns River estuary and the rich, low land that was the key resource for the plantation. It is hard to imagine what the plantation was like when it was more central to the life and economy of Jacksonville. The lifeways of people around and in the plantation were a combination of working the water and the land. I have interviewed people in Gainesville, Florida, who grew up in the area. Their memories are of their grandparents catching shrimp, working plots of land, and trying to see how the impending urbanism of the 20th century could provide them with benefits that the 19th century did not have. Close to Kingsley plantation is American Beach, a thriving core of African American life for North Florida that independent film maker John Sayles portrayed in his quasidocumentary film, Sunshine State (2002). The Kingsley Plantation forces us to rethink common images of plantations. The location, on the marshlands marked today by Jacksonville’s busy port activities, is strikingly different than the plantations of popular books and media. Rice, cotton, and indigo were the early crops raised there, crops that owed their harvest success to the agricultural skills of Africans who worked on the land. Later, cotton and sugar cane that were harvested there, and by the 1920s, the Plantation and surrounding land produced Florida oranges that were shipped out on the new railroad that later became known as the “Orange Blossom Special.” The plantation challenges other stereotypes as well. Zephaniah Kingsley and his Senegalese wife Anta owned slaves, and their descendants and the descendants of the enslaved people on the plantation intermixed within the evolving Jacksonville of the 20th century.

Ethnohistorical Study of the Kingsley Plantation Community

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