Since slave owners tortured slaves who continued to practice their African faiths and especially Islam, Diallo kept his religion hidden for a time until he was discovered by a child who found him praying to Allah. Publicly humiliated because he continued to practice his faith, Diallo attempted to escape his owner in but was soon caught and imprisoned in the Kent County, Maryland, courthouse.
While incarcerated, he met Rev. He also was fluent in the Wolof language, which he translated for Bluett. Although Bluett returned Diallo to his owner, he did help Diallo convince the owner his noble origins. Diallo also wrote a letter in Arabic intended for his father in Futa Toro. Oglethorpe bought Diallo, freed him, and sent him to London to begin a new life. Despite those contacts, he still had to contend with slave catchers who hoped to capture him and sell him to other slave traders.
He contacted Bluett, who was in London at the time. Concerned for his safety, Bluett raised funds among the London elite, including the Duke and Duchess of Montague, members of the royal family, to allow Diallo to return to Futa Toro.
In return, Diallo agreed to allow Bluett to write his memoirs, which were completed only after Diallo arrived in West Africa. Diallo returned in to discover that his father had passed, and his wives had remarried. Diallo, however, was able to see his children and remain in Futa Toro. Ironically, he went to work as an interpreter and slave trader for the Royal African Company until his death in at the age of seventy-two. Shipped to Annapolis, Maryland, Diallo spent two years there as a slave on a tobacco plantation.
Following an attempted escape, Diallo was imprisoned in a Kent County courthouse some distance away from his plantation. There, Diallo was discovered by Thomas Bluett: an attorney, judge, and clergyman of the county. After Bluett returned him to his plantation, Diallo wrote a letter intended for his father, but instead it reached James Oglethorpe, the Director of the Royal African Company. Moved by this letter, Oglethorpe purchased Diallo's freedom and paid for Diallo to travel across the Atlantic to stay with him in London.
During his stay, Diallo mingled with many members of London's social elite, including the Duke and Duchess of Montague. Although Bluett's account ends with Diallo sailing back to Africa, his story is continued in a separate account written by Francis Moore, an employee of the Royal African Company, who accompanied Diallo on his return trip.
Diallo made it safely back to Africa, where he lived into his seventies. Although he is best known for penning Diallo's narrative, Thomas Bluett had acquired a measure of renown prior to their meeting.
Later, Bluett became an attorney and judge in Annapolis, Maryland. After sending an account of Diallo in a letter sent to the Duke of Montague, Bluett published Diallo's narrative as a pamphlet in , which was later reprinted in the popular compilation of travel literature A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels Bluett's account of Diallo's story is, thus, one of the first American slave narratives to be printed. Following his association with Diallo, not much is known about Bluett's life.
He died in Diallo's story follows a pattern all too common in slave narratives - capture, enslavement, escape - but its finer points challenge the traditional arc of the American slave experience. He suffered relatively little harm while enslaved, was freed by a prominent white man, and enjoyed luxury in London before safely returning to Africa. Perhaps most interestingly, Diallo himself was a slave trader in Sengal prior to being captured. It was Diallo's father, a high priest of the Futa peoples, who "hearing of an English ship at Gambia River, sent Job, with two Servants to attend him, to sell two Negroes.
Diallo later sent these servants home and crossed the Gambia with Loumein Taoi, a man who understood the Mandingo language, and traded his slaves "for some Cows" p. While resting at a friend's house, the unarmed Diallo and Loumein were captured by several Mandingoes enemies of the Futa people , had their heads shaven to mask their high social status, and were placed in the same ship that carried the slaves that Diallo had just recently sold.
Diallo attempted to send word to his father that he had been captured, but his father was too late in delivering the ransom - Diallo's ship had already cast off. Once Diallo arrived in Annapolis, Maryland, he was separated from Loumein and was purchased by a man named Tolsey, the owner of some tobacco fields on Kent Island.
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