African Ancestors Memorial Garden

On the site of the vanished Gadsden's Wharf lies a memorial garden in memory of the captured Africans who were disembarked in Charleston Harbor. The outline of the old wharf was found in archival maps; it is repeated by the straight edge of a shallow pool and a strip of steel. In the water lie nameless human figures made of tabby mixed from lime, sand, and ground oyster shells. The water rises and recedes like the tide, so the reliefs are sometimes hidden beneath it and sometimes emerge in full.

In January two thousand sixteen, landscape architect Walter Hood came to Charleston's waterfront to solve a difficult problem: how to restore human scale to people whom port records counted as cargo. For three days, he surveyed the site and discussed the future garden with local historians, archaeologists, artists, and activists. He then created twenty-nine designs.

The central idea came from a small exhibit on Sullivan's Island. There, Hood saw the famous diagram of the slave ship Brookes: human figures laid out in rows in the hold, head to foot. British opponents of the slave trade circulated this drawing in seventeen eighty-eight to show the conditions of transport without soothing words or respectable phrasing.

The diagram held four hundred fifty-four people—the number a new British law allowed to be carried aboard. At the same time, a witness reported that Brookes had previously carried six hundred nine captives. The drawing was not a portrait of the passengers on a single voyage. Its creators took the ship's dimensions and filled the allotted space with human bodies. The result was an image in which the shipowner's calculation was clear at first glance.

Hood transferred this diagram to a site where ships like these really did stand only a few steps from shore. The figures in the Tide Tribute composition are life-size. Shells are visible within the reliefs: they were added to tabby, a local concrete made from lime, sand, and crushed oyster shells. Hood wanted the former small image from a book to occupy space beside a person.

The figures have no faces or names. Each represents a man, woman, or child among the captured Africans who were carried across the Atlantic Ocean and disembarked in Charleston Harbor. The organizers named this place African Ancestors Memorial Garden because some of those who arrived survived, started families, and passed crafts, knowledge, and family memory on to their children. Descendants of these people live in Charleston and far beyond it; it is rarely possible to establish exactly which of them passed through this wharf.

The water in the shallow pool rises and recedes in a cycle that recalls the tide. At times it hides the reliefs; at others it leaves the bodies entirely exposed. The pool's straight edge and a steel strip mark the former boundary of Gadsden's Wharf, reconstructed from old maps. The wharf itself is no longer here. Along its line lie the figures that Hood brought out of the ship's drawing at human scale.