Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor Emeritus of History, Johns Hopkins University.
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I first met Rich and Sally in the early 1970s. From the outset in their research, they stressed the creativity of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas. So potent were their arguments that some scholars later labeled them and other fellow travelers “Creation Theorists,” for their supposed over-emphasis on creolization—”the process by which people, animals, ideas, and institutions with roots in the Old World are born, grow, and prosper in the New.” Ever since I have known them, they have not been afraid to engage in contentious and controversial subjects. The early 1970s also saw the establishment of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Anthropology, with Rich as its founding chair and Sally one of its most distinguished graduate students. Those were heady days, as anthropologists and historians came together to explore central aspects of Atlantic History and Culture. After leaving Hopkins in the late 1980s Sally and Rich became, as he puts it, “freelance academics, without a university affiliation, based in the rural Caribbean.” At some points, they were not wholly peripatetic, putting down deep roots in Martinique and Paris, shallower ones in Williamsburg, Virginia (where we overlapped for a time) and now most recently in Coquina Key, Florida. In addition, for the past thirty or so years, they have functioned as a Caribbean hub in their own right, serving as book review editors of the premiere journal in the field, the New West Indian Guide. No one has read more Caribbean novels, short stories, poetry, and histories, in as many languages, as Rich and Sally. Both institutionally and intellectually, then, they have been at the center of the action, debating continuities and disjunctures, connections and ruptures, hybridities and syncretisms, gains and losses in African American cultural formation. A key question is the extent to which Africa or America should take centerstage in shaping the lives of enslaved peoples and their descendants. As I read them, Rich and Sally’s answer is to eschew stark binaries. “Survivalists” should not be pitted against “Creationists.” The oppositional character of the debate oversimplifies the complex reality of cultural formation. And there are no better guides to this process than Rich and Sally. I salute them, and apologize for not mentioning any of their scholarly writings due to time constraints.