A Game That Showed Me My Own Black History

The newest chapter of the Assassin’s Creed series gives me some of the things I’ve always
wanted in a video game: a heroic fantasy that lets me control a warrior
fighting against slavery. Part of it happens in Haiti, where my parents were
born. Characters talk in Antillean Kreyol, the mosaic tongue made of French and
West African words that I heard while growing up. But, mostly, it reminds me of
going to church with my mother. It makes me happy and sad at the same time.

Whether it was a first communion, wedding or funeral,
someone nestled in the crowd at these church functions would start singing the Haitian national anthem.
For no reason other than a deep longing for the home they’d left behind. Freedom
Cry calls up the same combination of mournfulness and pride that I’d hear
in those moments of song. I’m seriously thinking about having my dad over to
play it.

Warning: Spoilers
follow for Assassin’s Creed IV’s Freedom
Cry DLC

The add-on takes place 15 years after the events of ACIV‘s main campaign. Freedom
Cry focuses on Adéwalé, the
character who was the first mate on the Jackdaw, the ship captained by Edward
Kenway. In the time after that followed ACIV’s resolution, Ade has joined the
Assassins order and commands a ship of his own The Victoire. That craft wrecks
in the opening moments and Adéwalé finds himself on Saint-Domingue, the 18th
Century colony that became the
country we now call Haiti

https://lastchance.cc/assassins-creed-ivs-freedom-cry-add-on-is-the-good-ki-1485265925%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E

Once there, the Trinidadian-born Adéwalé falls in with a Maroon society, one of
the small communities of escaped
black people who fought the oppressive slave structures all over the
Caribbean. After getting his own ship, he fights to liberate slaves on land and
sea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNH-l3JCF14

Freedom Cry‘s best successes come
from finding story and gameplay in the historical moment where the game is set.
That’s true of most Assassin’s Creed
games but it’s a trickier proposition here since this chapter happens during
the era of slavery. The time when humans with one skin color traded humans with
another skin color like animals or property is an ugly period in history that
many people would rather forget or ignore, even when presented with the ways
that slavery’s legacy of prejudice, disenfranchisement and disempowerment lives
on.

Despite the potential for uncomfortableness, you get the sense
that the developers at Ubisoft’s Quebec studio knew what they were doing from
the very first moments in the game. The first shot zooms in across the deck of Adéwalé’s
ship, crewed by men who look like him, and stops at his stoic face above the
captain’s wheel. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that this—a black character in
the lead role—is a rare thing. And players who read the Animus Database entries
in Freedom Cry might be learning, for the first time, about the unsupported morality of the Code Noir, which put
forth a guideline for ‘humane treatment’ of slaves that was rarely followed.

For someone like me—who’s wanted deeper, cooler
and just
plain more visions of black people in video games—the invented drama here
is too delicious, mostly for how the metaphors and parallels to struggles
against slavery abound: using the element of surprise, needing to flee a naval
battle because Adéwalé’s ship is outmanned and outgunned, getting slammed by
rogue waves and waterspouts while trying to escape.

https://lastchance.cc/come-on-video-games-let-s-see-some-black-people-i-m-n-5897227%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E

Go into the upgrade menu and you’ll see descriptions like
this one for a steel machete:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na9-7oI-_O0

Speaking of scripting, I’m really glad the creatives on Freedom Cry stayed away from vodou. That’s not because
it’s not a legitimate and valuable religious practice. It is. Indeed, vodun
exemplifies the kind of syncretism—where elements of Roman Catholicism and West
African faith practices got mashed together—that’s come out of the Middle Passage.
But I’m glad Ubi Quebec didn’t go there because it’s become a tired cliché to
have some sort of voodoo/hoodoo mumbo jumbo in period-piece entertainments
dealing with Haiti, New Orleans or slavery. And such usage often reinforces the
institutionalized otherness of black people. “Look at that crazy mojo, they
do,” it says. “They ain’t nothing like regular folks.”

Freedom Cry puts
you in an early pivotal moment in that aforementioned othering of black people.
You’ll pass auctions in Port-au-Prince where barkers talk about the slaves as
merchandise. One of the game’s final levels forces Adéwalé to escape a
sinking slave ship that he’s unable to save, surrounded by the screaming,
burning bodies of people he’s called brothers. You’ll overhear street chatter where
people talk about how it’s illegal to teach slaves how to read or that they’re
animalistic in nature.

These attitudes evolved into legal and economic policies
designed to make people of African descent less free. While I played, I kept
asking myself if Freedom Cry cheapens
the historical horrors of the Triangle Trade to use them in an entertainment
like this. For me, it doesn’t. The chattel slavery of millions of black people from
the 16th to 19th Century is one of the most heinous things in human
history. But that doesn’t mean that it should be out-of-bounds as source
material for pop culture creations.

Nevertheless, the repetition of all the chasing and killing
drained some of the appeal from this slave revenge fantasy. And I can’t shake
the dissonance Freedom Cry carries with
it. It’s only going to be able to encapsulate but so much of what the real
lived experiences of what black bodies went through in this time period. And
modern, polite sensibilities are shot through the whole experience. Adéwalé is
superhumanly noble and the people he liberates suffer with a similarly
superhuman patience that stretches belief to its breaking point. And the lines
that Adéwalé delivers to the people he’s freed—”Trust yourself,” “You deserve a
choice”—do come across as trite, especially after you hear them dozens of times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3nkTBrBWls

Flaws aside, Freedom Cry draws
significant power from the place where it’s set, like Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation before it. It hits on some real feelings that
swirl around in the Haitian diasporan soul. Maybe it’s mostly my own experience
talking here but I’ve always found there to be a mix of resilience and fatalism
to the Haitian personality. The history of my ancestors is mythic but the
reality of their descendants has been brutal.

That singing I mentioned atop this essay always felt a
little haunted to me and as I grew up, it occurred to me, it was part of
Haiti’s history that hung in the air around me that never got talked about. My
mom used a machete in the garden. She could’ve used a hoe or a hand shovel but
a machete was what she grew up with. Later, when my siblings and I all left
home and the suburban neighborhood started going to seed, I seem to remember
her keeping one in her bedroom. And while she could’ve just knelt and prayed to
her dead mother and left it at that, she also set out two cups of strong black
coffee on a serving tray in the living room. Without ever explicitly talking
about it, I knew these things—the machete as tool and protection, that
particular form of ancestor veneration—were vestiges from when Haiti was a
slave colony filled with African people. Call me cynical but I never thought that
the history that spawned where those things I saw at home would ever matter
enough to the people making video games in 2013.

Never in a million years did I ever think I’d hear Haitian
Kreyol in a video game. And yet, there it was in Freedom Cry, as lilting and percussive as when my mom spoke it. For
the few hours I steered Adéwalé through his saga, I didn’t feel horribly
under-represented or taken for granted in the medium I write about. It’s a
feeling I could use more of.