Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley

Daniel L. Schafer

Anna Kingsley's life story adds a dramatic chapter to histories of the South, the state of Florida, and the African Diaspora. Both an American slave and a slaveowner and possibly an African princess. Anna was captured as a teenager in Senegal in 1806 and sold into slavery. Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr., a planter and slave trader from Spanish East Florida, bought her in Havana and took her to his St. Johns River plantation, where she soon became his household manager, his wife, and eventually the mother of four of his children.