Moussa Deyaha: Free in Africa, Enslaved in Haiti, Lifelong Service in Boston
Moussa Deyaha, Silhouette in collection of Boston Athenaeum
Moussa Deyaha’s journey to Jamaica Plain started in Africa.[1] His encounter with the slave-trading and enslaving Perkins family in St. Domingue (today’s Haiti) brought him to Boston for 39 years. We have no documentation of Moussa Deyaha in his own words. Instead, what we know of him is filtered through the biased narration of the Perkins family who enslaved him. But even viewed through the Perkins lens, Moussa Deyaha’s courage, resilience and survival skills shine through.
Moussa Deyaha was born around 1760 in West Africa. Contrary to the Perkins explanation for the origin of his first name, it likely was Moussa, the French spelling of the Arabic version of Moses.[1] As told by the Perkins family,[2] Moussa Deyaha was captured by slave traders while tending his family’s flocks with his father. He was forced to march in a month-long trek to the coast where he was chained into a ship to endure the grueling Middle Passage trip. Nearly two million Africans died while crossing the Atlantic. [14]
While Moussa Deyaha survived the Middle Passage, he was to be sold once more in Cap Français, St. Domingue (Haiti) in 1785. St. Domingue was at that time the wealthiest colony in the Americas, including the thirteen colonies.
According to Perkins family lore, one of the Perkins brothers happened to pass by a slave market and, noting Moussa Deyaha’s “dying condition,” bought him and sent him to the hospital where he recovered. Given that the three Perkins brothers – James, Thomas Handasyd and Samuel – were notorious slave traders who visited vessels in the Cap Français harbor to select enslaved people to purchase and then resell to enslavers on the island and owned slave ships,[3] [15] this sanitized version of a passerby’s kindness is dubious. After his recovery, the Perkins account says that the enslaved Moussa Deyaha worked in the counting house of their trading firm (traditionally an office in which a business’s financial books were kept) and “gained the trust” of his enslavers.
Implied in the Perkins’ story is that they saw something in Moussa Deyaha that indicated the investment in buying him and paying for his medical expenses would yield a return. Perhaps it was obvious that he was a Muslim and possibly knew how to read and write from studying the Qur’an? Did he perhaps speak another language in addition to his traditional African language?
The Haitian Revolution
In 1791, enslaved people on the St. Domingue sugar plantations rebelled, threatening the slave economy. The multi-year revolution resulted in the establishment in 1804 of Haiti as the first free Black republic and first sovereign Caribbean nation. The revolution’s effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. And Haiti was forced to pay the price through reparations of 90 million francs to former French enslavers that lasted until 1947. The indemnity bankrupted the Haitian treasury and left the country’s government deeply impoverished. [16]
In 1791, the Perkins family made a social visit at a plantation. Moussa Deyaha was also there and, hearing of local insurrection plans, warned James Perkins, enabling the family and their friends to escape, “probably sav[ing] the lives of the whole party.” James and his wife remained until the subsequent burning of Cap Français in 1792 led them to flee, leaving Moussa Deyaha behind in the face of the insurrection.
When Samuel, the last Perkins was evacuating St. Domingue in 1793, Mousse was again left in the midst of a revolution. According to the family, “Mousse refused to be left behind, swam out to the boats, and insisted on being taken aboard.”[4] Was the truth something else? Was the enslaved Moussa Deyaha forced to make the journey to Boston by Samuel Perkins? Alternatively, did Moussa Deyaha fear for his life if he stayed in St. Domingue? He was enslaved to James Perkins, a notorious slave trader, and had helped the Perkins family and their friends escape. His allegiances may have been known to the revolutionaries and made him a target to be killed.
The Boston Years
Having been ripped from his home in Africa and forced into slavery in Haiti, Moussa Deyaha then spent the next 39 years until his death in 1831 continuing to work for his former enslaver James Perkins and his family in Boston.[5],[6] Most likely Moussa Deyaha spent time in both the Perkins Pearl Street townhome and Jamaica Plain Pondside estate Pinebank built in 1802 with Perkins’s wealth originating from slave trading. The 1810 census records for Roxbury list one person in James Perkins’s home in the category “All other persons except Indians not taxed.” By 1830 James Perkins had died and the 1830 census for Boston lists one person in his widow Sarah Perkins’s home under the category of “Free Colored Persons, Males of fifty-five and under one hundred.” Moussa Deyaha would have been approximately 70 years old in 1830.
Moussa Deyaha stayed with the family until his death. Did he know that the 1783 Quock Walker case in Massachusetts courts opened the way to emancipation over the next several years?[7,8] Was he compensated for his labors in Boston? Did he have the resources to strike out on his own? Or did he weigh the pros and cons and decide it was more advantageous to remain with the Perkinses?
The Boston Atheneum displays a paper silhouette, donated by the Perkins family, of Moussa Deyaha alongside his obituary published by William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator on November 5, 1831 with credit given to abolitionist Zachariah Poulson’s newspaper Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser.[9]
An earlier obituary for Moussa Deyaha was published on August 17, 1831 in The Boston Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser. [10] While the Patriot version spells Moussa’s patronymic as “Deaha,” the two obituary versions are nearly identical but for one major difference. The November version published in the abolitionist papers includes an extra paragraph that calls attention to the kindness of the Perkins family to Moussa Deyaha and their claim of his devotion to them.
Given the Perkins family’s extensive history as slave traders and enslavers, it raises the question: Why choose to write an obituary for someone they had enslaved and share it in an anti-slavery newspaper? Perhaps it was part of the family’s campaign to recast themselves as generous benefactors during this period.
In many ways, the obituary is a self-promoting boast about the Perkins family’s self-perceived kindness to Moussa Deyaha. Nonetheless, it provides several insights into Moussa Deyaha and his history, noting that he believed himself to be “a sincere Mahommedan [Muslim]. He practiced, however, all the Christian virtues.”
The Atheneum exhibition sign notes that “young Perkins family members, whom he helped raise, called him ‘Daddy Mousse,’ ” underscoring, as historian Dr. Martine Jean explains, “his ties to bondage to the Perkinses and the family’s attempt to render that relationship invisible through intimacy.”[11]
After 46 years of being enslaved by and then serving the Perkins family, Moussa Deyaha was buried in in August 1831 in the same Cathedral Church of St. Paul vault as James Perkins. His obituary estimated that he was approximately 70 years old. He was reinterred in 1914 in Mattapan’s Mount Hope Cemetery on a plot purchased by St. Paul’s to which it moved 100 people whose families had not claimed them. The area is marked with a single cross, and there is no mention of Moussa Deyaha on the gravesite.[12],[13]
What we know of Moussa Deyaha is related through the eyes of his enslavers. Even so, his courage, resilience and survival skills are clear. Until his death, Moussa Deyaha adhered to his own name at a time when enslavers commonly re-named enslaved people and maintained his Muslim faith when many enslaved were forced to adopt Christianity. These victories underscore Moussa Deyaha’s success in preserving his personhood and dignity in a world stacked against him.
Notes
[1] Moussa Deyaha’s name was spelled as “Mousse” in Perkins family accounts. The obituary written by the Perkins family states that “His patronymic name was Deyaha.” He has also been referred to as Deyaha Moussa in recent articles. However, according to Dr. Emmanuel Akyeampong of the Harvard University Center for African Studies in an email dated February 20, 2023, his name was most likely Moussa Deyaha. “French territories tend to spell it Moussa and English territories Musa, the Arabic version of Moses.” It was a common Muslim name in West Africa.
In an email dated July 26, 2024, Dr. Barbara Brown proposed a different viewpoint. “A very well-known linguistic historian of West Africa, Prof. Fallou Ngom, [wrote to me on 3/23/24] that in the far western parts of West Africa (where Fallou grew up), Moussa is indeed a man’s first name. However, in the eastern parts of West Africa, where Moussa is a common appellation, Fallou wrote that Moussa is a “patronym”. He then added “In the lands of the Hausa, Moussa is a common family or last name.” I recently researched where the slave ships that arrived in Cap Francais came from in 1785. They came entirely from eastern ports of West Africa.”
[2] Reminiscences of the Insurrection in St. Domingo, by Samuel G. Perkins, annotated by Charles C. Perkins, Reprinted from the proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1886
[3] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 23. Sources cited are: Seaburg and Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston, 40. In July 1792, Samuel Gardner Perkins wrote from St. Domingue to James of going in with a partner to purchase some newly imported enslaved Africans: “a ship arrived from the coast with slaves & we immediately proposed purchasing together, but as I was extremely busy he went on board [and] visited the negroes.” He describes boarding the slave ships as part of the normal course of business, and makes it clear that had not been otherwise occupied he would have gone himself. Samuel G. Perkins to James Perkins, July 16, 17, 1792, box 1, item 10, Perkins Family Papers, 1780–1882, MSS. L816, Boston Athenaeum, Massachusetts
[4] Reminiscences of the Insurrection in St. Domingo, by Samuel G. Perkins, annotated by Charles C. Perkins, Reprinted from the proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1886
[5] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 24. Sources cited are: Seaburg and Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston, 89; Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Mousse’s name is spelled variously both within and across multiple sources. We have chosen to use the name and spelling used in his obituary, printed by the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831. See “DIED [Mousse],” The Liberator (Boston, MA), November 5, 1831.
[6] “Mattapan grave tells story of slavery, Haitian revolution” by Wayne Tucker, Bay State Banner, May 5, 2022
[7] Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, Harvard University, 2022, Page 24. Sources cited are: Seaburg and Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston, 89; Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Mousse’s name is spelled variously both within and across multiple sources. We have chosen to use the name and spelling used in his obituary, printed by the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831. See “DIED [Mousse],” The Liberator (Boston, MA), November 5, 1831.
[8] “Mattapan grave tells story of slavery, Haitian revolution” by Wayne Tucker, Bay State Banner, May 5, 2022
[9] The Liberator, Volume 1, No. 45, November 5, 1831
[10] The Boston Patriot & Mercantile Advertiser, August 17, 1831. Available online at MyHeritage Library Edition via Boston Public Library Online Resources.
[11] “Update on Deyaha Moussa” by Wayne Tucker, Eleven Names Project, Open Notebook, November 21, 2022
[12] “Mattapan grave tells story of slavery, Haitian revolution” by Wayne Tucker, Bay State Banner, May 5, 2022
[13] https://www.stpaulboston.org/200-years-of-st-pauls/burials-and-tombs-of-st-pauls-pt-1 and https://www.stpaulboston.org/200-years-of-st-pauls/burials-and-tombs-at-st-pauls-pt-2
[14]
[15] Voyages 25047 and 25300. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database T.H. Perkins Co. letterbooks, compiled by James Elliot Cabot, Thomas Handasyd Perkins Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, reel 6, pp. 42—44
[16] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html