Sarah Margu Comes To Life

Writer Jamil Ragland reviews a March 7, 2026 performance of “Sarah Margu: Child of the Amistad” at Prosser Library in Bloomfield, CT. Historian and performer Tammy Denease portrays Sarah Margu, one of six children kidnapped from Sierra Leone and brought aboard the infamous schooner La Amistad. Rather than centering the story on the well-known legal case or the horrors of enslavement, Denease’s 45-minute one-woman performance focuses on Margu’s full life arc: her childhood, her freedom after the Hartford trial, and her remarkable later years, which included becoming the first African woman to graduate from an American college at Oberlin. Denease, who has performed this role for over 20 years through her company Hidden Women, draws on deep archival research and elder interviews to tell the human side of a story that history has largely reduced to a legal footnote.

https://midbrow.org/sarah-margu-comes-to-life