'The Sergeant' by Dean Calbreath
Nicholas Said was a remarkable figure by most accounts and the challenge of writing about him was that most of what we know comes from his own accounts. As author Dean Calbreath acknowledges, the African who came to the U.S. as Nicholas Said was disingenuous by necessity as he adapted himself to one hard situation after another. He wrote an autobiography and went on the lecture circuit where the sight of an articulate Black man with a tattooed face and a lot of good stories was an attraction. Said sold copies and sold tickets.
Calbreath was part of a Pulitzer-winning team of reporters investigating Congressional bribery; The Sergeant is proof that the methods of a good reporter and a good historian are similar. Calbreath followed the paper trail, comparing Said’s narratives with travel books from the era as well as newspaper and other archival records. He is able to disprove certain points in Said’s autobiography but presents a plausible case that most of his incredible story was true.
Said was born Mohammed Ali ben Said, circa 1837, in Borno, a kingdom in what is now northeastern Nigeria. The population of the city where he grew up, Kukawa, was 40,000, larger than most U.S. cities at the time. His father was a general and his primary mission was slave raiding for the bustling markets of Libya and Egypt. But when victory turned to defeat, Said found himself in captivity. He was force-marched across Africa to Libya where he “wanted to be sold to a Turk, since they had a habit of paying allowances to household slaves which they could save to buy their freedom.”
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One of The Sergeant’s persistent themes concerns the many forms of bondage Said encountered. A high-ranking Turkish official sold Said to a visiting Russian envoy who admired the young African for his mastery of many languages. When he was brought to Russia, he became free because slavery as such was illegal in the empire despite the enormous population of serfs, who had the advantage of being bound to the land they worked, which kept families together and prevented the worst cruelties of the American slave system.
Said was able throughout his life to accommodate himself to his surroundings. He abandoned Islam for Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia and turned Protestant in the U.S. He joined an African American regiment in the Union army during the Civil War. Afterward, he threw himself into efforts to bring education and economic opportunities to the freed slaves. Working with former slaveholders, Said positioned himself as a reformer rather than a radical, preaching a message of self-improvement rather than calling for civil rights.
Calbreath explains Said by reference to the African folktale of the toad and the rat, “where the quiet and unthreatening toad advances farther than the stridently forceful rat.” Said played cautiously with the hands he was dealt and survived.
