THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407230020
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN E. QUINONES MILLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BALTIMORE LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
TRAVEL BACK into time. Travel back to a century when the Baltimore Harbor sheltered dark, foreboding ships filled with human cargo chained to the decks.
To make this historical journey, you need travel only 150 miles north to visit the Great Blacks in Wax Museum - the nation's only wax museum dedicated to African-American history.
African-American historical sites normally focus on one of three major areas - pre-slavery Africa, the middle passage and slavery, and post-slavery America and the civil rights movement.
This museum, established in 1983, spans the spectrum.
More than 100 figures and exhibits are crowded into the renovated firehouse. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is featured, of course, and so is singer Billie Holiday, actor Paul Robeson, writer Richard Wright and baseball great Jackie Robinson.
But also featured is Makaada, the Queen of Sheba, the Egyptian king Akhenaton who brought monotheism to his country, the Egyptian physician Imhotep, King Mansa Musa of Mali empire who made his country the political and cultural center of West Africa, and Hannibal, the North African king who took elephants across the Alps to invade Rome.
But the visually powerful images are not always uplifting. Some are downright depressing.
``If you go down on the ship. . . and for God's sake go down on the ship. . Johnson boomed at a group of school children in a rich baritone voice reminiscent of James Earl Jones.
The group of young teenagers nervously looked at each other, then toward the stairs leading to a replica of an 18-century slave ship.
``Did you know that 100 million people made the trip from their homeland in Africa to these United States?'' Johnson said. ``These were not wild savages, my friends. No, they were young people, just like you. Some of them were Mandingo, some were Hausa, and some were Dingo, but they were all captured like animals and made to bear the most unbearable conditions as they traveled to a land that none of them had ever seen, a land to which none of them wanted to go.
``So when you go down there to the ship be prepared not to be happy. This is a place that will make you sad.''
The teenagers descended the stairs to the ship quietly, two by two, some holding hands, and all with solemn looks on their young faces. They walked slowly through the hull of the schooner that held dozens of dark-skinned figures with looks of utmost hopelessness on their wax faces - chained to each other and squeezed together more like sardines than men. Many had bloody welts raised on the backs, and a figure of a white man standing close by with a whip in hand explained why.
The men did not have enough room even to stand erect, for only 4 feet above them was a wooden hold that contained more men in the same number and the same condition.
A wooden plaque near the men's quarters contains a narrative dictated by Olaudah Equiano, who was captured at age 7, detailing his experience on board a slave ship.
``Having never before seen the sea, a ship, nor a white man, I was filled with astonishment and horror. I felt I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that the strange-looking people were going to eat me. I had no doubts of my fate when I looked around and saw a large furnace or copper pot boiling and a multitude of black people of every description, chained together, every one of their faces expressing dejection and sorrow. I became so overpowered with horror and anguish I fainted.
``After I was revived and put down under the decks I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life. With the loathesomeness of the stench, and with my crying I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat. For my inability to eat, two of the white men took hold of me and flogged me severely. I now wished for my last friend, death, to relieve me.''
A 10-year-old boy who was touring the exhibit with his mother and older brother shook his head at the figures then stepped back and declared, ``No one would have been able to capture me, and if they did I'd be like Indiana Jones and bust my way out.''
The boy's mother, a middle-aged woman with graying cornrows and sad brown eyes, looked at him with a quiet smile and said nothing. His brother, an elder by no more than three years, scowled down at him and said in voice full of disgust, ``Shut up.'' MEMO: The Great Blacks in Wax Museum is at 1601 E. North Ave., Baltimore, Md.
21213. Phone: 410-563-6415. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday are among more than 100 famous
people whose likenesses can be found in the Great Blacks in Wax
Museum in Baltimore.
by CNB