The machinery of the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra ran on a grim supply chain, with each link feeding into the next. At the top of the chain stood the purchasers—European and American traders driven by an insatiable hunger for sugar, land, and wealth. Their ships lined the coast, ready to carry human cargo across the Atlantic.

On the African side, the most powerful brokers were the Aro Confederacy. This highly organized, multilingual network controlled vast trade routes, shrines, and markets deep into the interior. For the Aro, the traffic in human beings was more than business—it was also a means to expand their influence, tighten their grip over rival groups, and accumulate wealth.

Supplying the Aro were an array of tribal chiefs, kidnappers, and militia warriors who held the power of selection. They decided who would remain within the community and who would be sold into the market of flesh. Sometimes entire groups were rounded up; other times, only a few individuals were taken—chosen not at random, but with purpose.

And at the end of this chain stood the most tragic figure: the unsuspecting individual, men, women, and children pulled from their homes and thrust into a system beyond their imagination.

Selection was not arbitrary. Purchasers sought captives based on skills, origins, and circumstances of enslavement. A skilled hunter might be kept in Africa, armed with new weapons, and put to work providing for his captors. But foreign traders valued something different. They wanted captives who were not only skilled but also disconnected from their kinship ties—people less likely to be rescued or rebel, and more likely to adapt to plantation life. For the Aro, expulsion from the tribe could mark someone for bondage. For Europeans, that same estrangement made the person all the more marketable.

Together, this cruel calculus fed the transatlantic trade. Europe’s desire for sugar and profit found its supply in the human lives torn from the rivers and forests of the Bight of Biafra.

The story of my family begins in Africa, where both my paternal and maternal bloodlines first took root. Torn from their homeland, my ancestors crossed the Atlantic and were cast into North America—first into Virginia, then into North Carolina. By the 1840s, their paths converged in Tipton County, Tennessee, where a new chapter of our history began.