The Sergeant, page 1
This book is dedicated to my wife Sarah Thailing, son Ian, and daughter Ava, who put up with me for more than a decade as I researched and wrote this book, and to the men of the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (African Descent) and their comrades throughout the U.S. Colored Troops, who fought to make this a better country.
Author’s Note
This is a true story, based largely on the writings of Nicholas Said, including a memoir in the Atlantic magazine and a letter regarding his mystical religious beliefs, both of which appeared in 1867, as well as his full-length autobiography published in 1874. Those writings have been bolstered by contemporary newspaper articles, letters, diaries, speeches, military records, and other documents, which have helped fill in some of the gaps in his writings, including his service in the Civil War. There are occasional discrepancies in his memoirs (for instance, disagreements over what year a particular event took place), so in each case I chose the version that best seemed to fit the facts and context, while mentioning in the endnotes that there is an alternate version.
Unfortunately, many of the writings and speeches quoted in the book, beginning when he first arrived in the United States, contain outdated and often offensive terms for Africans and African-Americans, including the most offensive one, which appears nearly two dozen times in the text. We debated whether to replace each reference with an “n------,” but eventually decided to leave the word intact to provide a more viscerally accurate view of the prejudices Said encountered on his travels in the United States, both North and South.
“Cultural literacy requires detailed knowledge about the oppression of racial minorities,” Randall Kennedy, an African-American law professor at Harvard, recently wrote. “A clear understanding of ‘nigger’ is part of this knowledge. To paper over that term or to constantly obscure it by euphemism is to flinch from coming to grips with racial prejudice that continues to haunt the American social landscape.”
1 Voyage of the Recruit
Mohammed Ali ben Said was born to be a fighter. His father, Barca Gana, was one of the greatest generals the kingdom of Borno ever knew. Armed with a talisman to protect him from harm, Barca Gana had a reputation for standing firm in battle when others melted away. Nobody could wield a weapon like he could. He could hurl eight spears one after another and hit his target each time. Thousands of warriors followed him into battle, clad in chain mail, with iron helmets wrapped within their turbans. As their armored horses pounded across the plains of Central Africa, they chanted praises to their general. “Who in battle is like the rolling of thunder? Barca Gana. Who spreads terror in battle like an angry buffalo? Barca Gana.”
Balladeers sang Barca Gana’s praises. Storytellers spun tales about his victories. Dût al Harba, they called him. Lion of War. To reward his prowess, Borno’s rulers made him one of the country’s wealthiest men—the governor of six provinces along the fertile Shari River, where he held a string of plantations. “He was a powerful negro, of uncommon bravery…,” wrote British army lieutenant Dixon Denham, who befriended him. “He was keen, possessed great quickness of observation, and… [had a] manner, which was gentle and particularly pleasing.”
As a child, Mohammed Ali ben Said practiced to be like his father, learning at a young age how to ride horses and handle weapons, for hunting if not for war. Outside the walls of Kukawa, Borno’s fortressed capital, young Mohammed led armies of boys in mock battles with wooden swords and shields. Mohammed loved to boast about how his foes would scatter before him like chaff before the wind, and he looked forward to the day he could fight at his father’s side. By the time he was nine, at least three of his older brothers were already in the army, and he fully expected to join them in his teens.
But when Mohammed prepared for his first real battle, his father had been dead for nearly two decades and he was six thousand miles from Borno, baptized into a religion that his countrymen considered idolatrous, and using a name none of them would have recognized, while fighting under a flag of red, white, and blue. He would soon learn that the most daunting battles did not involve guns or swords, but how to change hearts and minds on both sides of a fight.
* * *
As dusk fell on the evening of July 29, 1863, Nicholas Said was leading a squad of soldiers through a muddy field in North Carolina, practicing for an attack on Confederate forces twelve miles down the road. In his upper twenties, Said was a sergeant in the Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment (African Descent), the second regiment in US history to be mainly composed of freeborn “colored” troops, preceded only by its sister regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. Said and his men had been up since 4:30 that morning, and now, nearly fifteen hours later, they were exhausted and sweating as the sun disappeared beyond the western marshlands. Sometime tomorrow or the next day, the Fifty-Fifth was slated to face combat for the first time, and before that happened, it had to coordinate its moves with the two other regiments assigned to the attack: the First and Second North Carolina, wholly composed of now free men.
In the murky twilight, the three regiments maneuvered through a rough flatland that had once been a forest and was still studded with stumps of pines and oaks. Assembling and reassembling into different formations—by company, by column, by file, in advance, in retreat—three thousand men practiced firing their rifles in coordinated barrages, filling the air with gunsmoke as they shot blank cartridges at make-believe foes, in volleys so deafening their ears would be ringing for the next several hours.
Unlike the North Carolinians, most of whom had escaped or been freed from nearby plantations, the men of the Fifty-Fifth had come from all over the country to fight: Pennsylvania metalworkers, New York teamsters, New England sailors, and farmers from nearly every state of the Union. But of all the soldiers of “African descent” on the field that evening, Sergeant Said was the only one who had been born in Africa, a distinction that was as visible as the features of his face. His forehead, cheeks, and chin were scarred with an array of lines and curves marking him as a member of one of Borno’s leading families, a ritualistic tattoo that gave him an aura of mystique among his fellow soldiers, many of whom knew little about Africa other than tales passed down from their grandparents or beyond.
Slender in build, average in height, with a wispy goatee and tightly clipped curls of raven-black hair, Said had inherited his father’s soldierly bearing. “Standing silently and erect, he looked as if some master hand had carved the figure from some piece of black stone,” an acquaintance would later write. A photograph taken shortly before he came to the Carolinas captured his tough, watchful gaze, befitting a newly minted sergeant, but barely hinted at his wiry strength (it once required four policemen to subdue him in a London brawl) and failed to capture his tattoos, hidden among the shadows of his skin.
Like his father, Nicholas Said was a contemplative soul, “deep in the philosophies,” as one army officer put it. “No one can see or talk with him without being most favorably impressed with his deportment and intelligence,” the Boston Evening Transcript reported, noting his “modest and gentlemanly” personality, his “curious and romantic” travels, and his mastery of linguistics. He could speak nine languages: English, French, Russian, German, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Kanuri, which was Borno’s main language, and Mandara, the language of his mother’s homeland. And he was constantly dabbling in others, such as Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew, although on this particular evening, his vocabulary was limited to echoing commands barked by his lieutenant: “Left wheel,” “Right wheel,” “Close ranks,” “Fire!”
Night had fallen by the time Sergeant Said and his men finished their drilling, so they trudged back to their encampment under the light of a full moon that was drifting in and out of the gathering clouds. As the regimental band practiced in the distance, the soldiers of the Fifty-Fifth relaxed around their campfires: singing songs, playing cards, writing letters home, gossiping about the day’s events, or swapping stories about the towns they had come from, the journeys that had brought them here, and the loved ones they had left behind.
Sergeant Said tended to be a star attraction at these fireside gatherings. Soldiers clustered around to hear his tales of hunting gazelles in the African plains, walking two thousand miles barefoot across the Sahara, braving armed bandits on the road to Mecca, exploring the sultan’s harem in Istanbul, or plotting romantic rendezvous in the Austrian Alps. Even the top brass was impressed by his travels through the palaces of Europe and encounters with such luminaries as Queen Victoria, Emperor Napoleon III, and Tsar Nicholas I, his indirect namesake. Maj. Charles Bernard Fox, the regiment’s third in command, enjoyed the stories so much that he begged Said to write them down, citing their “great degree of literary quality.”
When Sergeant Said drifted off to sleep that night, he fully expected to be facing battle the next day or the day after. But at 4:30 in the morning, he was awakened to learn the plans had changed. There would be no battle. Instead, in the midst of a summer downpour, the regiment had to break camp and march a couple of miles down the road to the Union-held port of New Bern, to board transport ships to sail to an undisclosed location for an unspecified assignment. The departure was so sudden the men were told to take only their most essential belongings, leaving their tents and other items to be collected later. Wrapped in rubberized blankets to shield themselves from the pouring rain, most of the men boarded the steam-driven passenger ship Maple Leaf, but Sergeant Said and his platoon, along with nearly four hundred other men, were loaded onto the tall-masted schooner Recru
As the ships pushed off, rumors swirled about why they were being pulled out of North Carolina just a week after they arrived from Boston. Even among the commissioned officers (all of whom were white), only a handful knew the details of their next assignment, except that it was somewhere in South Carolina. “It will be perfectly jolly if we can have a hand in the taking of Charleston,” Lt. Charles Bowditch wrote. “How the Southern female population would hate to pay proper respect to the colored soldiers of Massachusetts.” But the prevailing gossip was that some disaster had befallen their sister regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, and the Fifty-Fifth had been summoned to help complete its task.
The steamship Maple Leaf, carrying six hundred troops, took just three days to reach its destination, chugging 260 miles along the Confederate coastline under a full head of steam, but the tall-masted Recruit took three times as long, driven off course by squalls and then slowed by headwinds and stalled by doldrums that did not provide enough breeze to fill its sails. Even when it was within sight of its goal, the Recruit would have to wait for three days for the steam-driven tugboat Escort to guide it through the treacherously shallow waters.
What Sergeant Said didn’t know is that now that he had entered the South, he would never leave. He spent the next two years in a two-front war against Southern slavery and Northern prejudices, and afterward, instead of returning north with his comrades, he became a soldier in a different kind of army, fighting to improve the lives of former slaves. As nightriders and Klansmen terrorized the Southern countryside, he served as one of the nation’s first Black voting registrars, helping hundreds of former slaves cast their first votes; established or taught at more than half a dozen “colored schools”; and toured the Southern lecture circuit, drawing interracial audiences to hear his calls for tolerance and understanding. At the peak of his fame, some white Southerners mocked him as a “Hottentot humbug” but others praised him as “a distinguished African” who “talks intelligently on almost every subject.” In the North, The Nation magazine even suggested he might make a good ambassador or vice president someday.
And then, as the Reconstruction era faded into history, Nicholas Said mysteriously disappeared from view. Perhaps, as some would have it, he died in obscurity as a destitute schoolteacher eking out a living in the cotton fields of Tennessee. Or perhaps, if a couple of dubious but heavily circulated news stories are to be believed, he spent his latter years in prison, condemned to dig for coal in the convict mines of Alabama.
In the summer of 1863, however, all those events were far in the future. To quote a proverb from Said’s homeland: “Ago fugubete, komande genya, ngudo dabu kurkguamai tsurui.” “Not even a long-necked bird can see the things to come.” In a way, the voyage of the Recruit was a fitting metaphor for his life up to that point. Since childhood, his travels had been determined by the shifting winds of fate, propelling him through uncharted waters by a series of random events: an antelope hunt in the plains near Lake Chad; a fire in a Libyan tobacco shop; a debate with a preacher on the Aegean Sea; an aristocratic wedding in the English countryside. Now he had set a more decisive course, taking him to the battle lines of this two-front war against what he called “the plague of humanity: prejudice of color,” although unlike the Recruit, he had no Escort to guide him through the shoals.
2 The Lion of War and His Son
Today, Kukawa, where Mohammed Ali ben Said was born and raised, is a dusty desert town in northeastern Nigeria. Cinderblock shanties with roofs of corrugated tin are surrounded by hardscrabble fields where the disintegrated rubble barely hints at the grand buildings that once occupied that space. The people who live there are mostly manual laborers and subsistence farmers, eking out a living from the parched earth. In 2015 Kukawa made headlines when jihadists from the terrorist group Boko Haram massacred worshippers at local mosques and then attacked their homes, gunning down families preparing their evening meals, leaving nearly a hundred dead. In 2020, a Boko Haram offshoot returned to kidnap hundreds of refugees who had already been displaced by conflicts in the region.
But in the 1840s, when Said was growing up, Kukawa (or “Kouka,” as he called it) was one of the most powerful cities south of the Sahara. It was capital of the sheikhdom of Borno, a land whose history dated back at least a thousand years to when it began accruing wealth from camel-borne merchants leading caravans through the region. Kukawa was its newest city, founded in 1814 to replace the 340-year-old former capital, Ngazargamu, but it already had 40,000 residents—merchants, artisans, bureaucrats, scholars—which swelled to 100,000 during the dry season, when farmers pitched their tents outside its walls to wait for rain. By comparison, in 1840 only 11 cities in the United States had more than 40,000 residents.
Like most of Borno’s major cities, Kukawa was surrounded by thirty-foot-tall walls of hardened white clay, with the minaret of the central mosque peering above them like a shepherd guarding his flock. Kukawa’s main gates opened onto the Great Dendal, a broad boulevard that cut through the center of the city toward Billa Gedibe (the Eastern Village), the neighborhood where Borno’s ruler, Sheikh Umar ibn al-Amin, and the rest of the elite lived. “During the whole day, [the Dendal] is crowded by numbers of people on horseback and on foot, free men and slaves, foreigners as well as natives, everyone in his best attire, to pay his respects to the sheikh or his vizier, to deliver an errand, or to sue for justice or employment, or a present,” wrote German geographer Heinrich Barth, who visited Kukawa when Said was a teen.
Mohammed Ali ben Said grew up in one of the finest villas in Billa Gedibe, a short walk from Sheikh Umar’s sprawling compound. Judging from other homes of the elite, the walled villa’s gates probably opened onto a stable for Barca Gana’s most prized horses, together with enough cows, goats, and chickens to supply the household with its daily needs. (The rest of their livestock was kept on farms outside the city.) Next to the stable was a row of slave quarters, and beyond that lay a central courtyard, surrounded by four smaller courtyards containing the adobe homes of Barca Gana’s four wives and their children—large conical buildings topped with onion-shaped domes. On one end of the central courtyard stood an open-air kitchen where slaves cooked the household’s meals; on the other, a flight of stairs led to Barca Gana’s private quarters on the second story, giving him a bird’s eye view of his villa as well as the streets outside.
It was likely in this villa that Said was born in 1837 or so (he was never certain of his birth year), with midwives and slaves tending to his mother, Dalia, as she lay on the bed she usually shared with her younger children. When Said was eight days old, he was taken to a wontsam, a barber who handled circumcision and tattoos. Using a sharp razor, the wontsam marked Said with the symbols of his lineage. He carved a line from the top of Said’s forehead to the tip of his nose and then, as he bled and screamed, slashed nearly a hundred other cuts onto his cheeks, chin, belly, arms, thighs, legs and chest. Salt shards were pressed into the wounds, to keep them from healing, and then he was officially given his name: Mohammed Ali ben Said. The name would last no more than nineteen years, but the scars would remain for the rest of his life.
Young Mohammed, the thirteenth of Dalia’s nineteen children, spent most of his earliest years in his mother’s courtyard and home, surrounded by his siblings and raised with the help of slaves, who cooked his meals, sewed his clothing, and tended to his other needs under Dalia’s guidance. He saw relatively little of his father. Under Islamic law, a man with more than one wife was supposed to spend an equal amount of time with each of his families, meaning that Dalia and her children probably occupied no more than a quarter of Barca Gana’s time. He also had concubines, further cutting into the time he spent with each of his families.
But what kept Barca Gana away the most was his work as a soldier. He was the chief kachella (general) of Borno’s army, and his military campaigns could last months at a time. During his long absences, his wives kept order in their households. “[Dalia] was very strict with her children, often severe, as were indeed all my father’s wives… for he left the rearing and training of his children exclusively to their mothers, having never chastised any of us that I can remember,” Said wrote. “The reason was the almost incessant wars and irruptions that had for a long lapse of time disturbed the peace of my country, gave him but little time to turn his mind to domestic affairs.”
