By Gillian Graham
Staff Writer

With two simple words, the tide turned.
Ninety-eight years after residents of Malaga floated their homes away from the island they called home, Marnie Darling Voter stood near where a schoolhouse once stood and listened to Gov. John Baldacci say “I’m sorry” for an episode of Maine history that some thought was better left untold.
In 1912, nearly 40 black, white and mixed-race people lived off the coast of Phippsburg on Malaga Island. Most earned a living fishing waters around the island and lived in dirt-floored houses. All but five were descended from Benjamin Darling, a black man who bought a nearby island in 1794.
Newspaper articles at the time described island residents as unclean and immoral, stories that in part led state officials to clear the island of inhabitants. Eight residents were sent to the Maine Home for the Feeble-Minded, later known as the Pineland Center, in New Gloucester, while others were given a deadline to leave.
When eviction day rolled around, the houses had been floated away and all that remained was the schoolhouse, which later was moved to another island. The graveyard was dug up, bones placed in three boxes and moved to Pineland Cemetery in New Gloucester to be reburied under headstones marked 1912.  
Voter, who grew up in South Portland and now lives in Windham, first heard of Malaga Island while researching her family genealogy. Shortly after marrying her husband, Del, she began digging through genealogy books to put together a family tree. Darling, she thought, was an English name. Finding no reference to her family, she was discouraged by the time she reached for the last book of Darlings.
“I got down to the very last one and it was a cardboard mimeographed thing glued together. It said Ben Darling of Casco Bay,” she said. “My great-grandfather and all of his children were listed. I looked at Del and said ‘it’s about a black guy.’ He said ‘you never know.’”
Excited to find she was an eighth-generation descendant of Benjamin Darling, she rushed home to tell her father.
“He said if you ever talk about this in my house again, you are not welcome here. He said it’s not true and somebody is just spreading vicious lies,” Del Voter said.
“To his dying day he said it was not true,” Marnie Voter added.
Voter said she tried to talk to some of her aunts, uncles and cousins to see what they knew about their connection to Benjamin Darling, but again met with resistance.
“I was ridiculed, mocked, yelled at. Always, ‘why do you want to bring this up now?’ Because it’s important, it’s who we are,” she said. “I saw it as a black man who bought his own island in 1794 and lived his life as a free man at fishing, who was well-respected. How many black men in America back then could have done that?”
As she and her husband continued to research the Darling family, they came across newspaper articles that described the people of Malaga and their removal. Their research showed Benjamin Darling bought Horse Island – now called Harbor Island – in 1794. His granddaughters, Fatima and Hannah, settled on Malaga Island with their husbands. Their descendants were evicted from the island.
What happened there didn’t sit well with Voter.
 “I’ve always wanted justice, I don’t want anyone mistreated,” she said.
She began to feel even more connected to the island after seeing artifacts dug up by Dr. Nathan Hamilton, Dr. Robert Sanford and a team of archaeology students from the University of Southern Maine. Sitting in his lab, Voter saw remnants of Malaga for the first time.
“I think it was the care that was given to these little pieces of the past. I started weeping. There was a little smoking pipe and a fishhook and a piece of porcelain and a button. I looked at (Hamilton) and I said ‘and nothing remains of those who lived there.’ I just wept,” she said. “For them to try to wipe them off the face of the Earth, but yet they still spoke. Their lives spoke. I feel so fortunate to have been just a small part of this and so grateful.”
Wanting to honor their stories, she continued her research and had conversations with many of her 37 first cousins. Some, she found, were fascinated by Darling family history while others continued to look the other way.
    
Carol Darling Campbell, Marnie’s first cousin, said she grew up knowing her family had an indirect connection to Malaga, though it was not discussed frequently. Older members of the family distanced themselves from the story. Campbell, who lives in South Portland, said her father was close to a cousin, Nelson McKenney, who grew up on Malaga.
 “I’m proud of it, I’m proud of all my ancestors,” Campbell said. “My father was a compassionate person, but he didn’t talk about it much either.”
Campbell’s younger sister, Lorna Darling-Kierstead of South Portland, said she grew up hearing rumors about Malaga but no definitive stories. She attributed the difference in familiarity with family history to a 15-year age difference between the sisters. Once Voter began sharing her research, the family connection to Malaga became obvious, Darling-Kierstead said.
 “I was totally fascinated by it. I was almost spellbound by it,” she said.
Their cousin, Dana Darling of Cape Elizabeth, said finding out about his connection to the island was “pretty cool.” Like many of his cousins, the only references he heard to Malaga were from family members who used the word “malagite” to describe undesirable people. He understood it was a derogatory term, but never knew its origin.
 “I was just impressed that the Maine coast life went back seven generations,” Darling said. “We have a strong family connection to the sea.”
While Voter had traced the family tree through records, she wanted a more definitive connection to Benjamin Darling.
The connection came from Dana Darling’s DNA: Results traced the family’s roots to the western coast of Africa.

Though they heard the stories, saw the family tree and embraced their legacy, the Darling cousins did not set foot on Malaga until this month. Standing on Malaga led Darling to ponder “what it must have been like to scratch out a living on a small island.”
 “What struck me was the hardship that there must have been for this colony of people who were not readily accepted, who were outsiders,” he said. “I was struck by the isolation from society but that they were not that isolated from the mainland.”
Darling-Kierstead said taking a lobster boat to Malaga alongside her sister was a moving experience.
 “It was amazing to see,” she said. “It was a hard life for anyone in 1912, especially islanders. It just showed how strong they were to live like that and survive.”
Campbell said the Malaga episode was “something that shouldn’t have happened” and she was grateful for Baldacci’s apology.
 “I think it was a terrible thing that has finally been righted,” she said. “It was a proud day for our family and the history of Maine.”

For Voter, stepping on the island after half a lifetime of piecing together the story was more profound.
“I didn’t know what I’d do. I didn’t know if I’d cry or be happy. I was so thrilled to finally be standing on the island. I made it, I made it, I’m here,” she said. “When the program started, I got very, very emotional because all I ever wanted was for someone to say it was wrong.”
When she first set out to learn about her family, Voter never imagined she would become a spokesman for descendants of Malaga’s inhabitants. Some direct descendants are still affected by the stigma of poverty and feeble-mindedness, she said.
“They can’t talk about it because it still smacks, it still hurts,” she said. “I stand for them because they’re just not able to stand for themselves yet.”
Voter wrote to a direct descendant to say, in some ways, she felt like an interloper because she is an indirect descendant. Sitting in her living room a week after her trip to Malaga, Voter read from the letter she received in response.
“She wrote, ‘It was a great day, a long overdue show of respect and apology to a group of people who were not treated as such, not treated as human beings. My grandmother, who was one of the most intelligent, kind and funny people I’ve ever met, is looking down and smiling her quiet, sweet smile. She suffered her whole life working to keep her secret her own, and she lived in fear because of where she was born. She would be happy that things have turned.’ She called me a champion of Malaga,” Voter said. “Oh my Lord, I cried. I cried and cried and cried.”
After years of telling the Malaga story to anyone who would listen, Voter paused last week to ponder what happens next. She and her husband are writing a family genealogy with historical sketches to be published next year. But, in her mind, the fight to uncover what happened on Malaga is drawing to a close.     
 “It’s a goodly heritage. I’m so grateful Malaga has come out from under the curse,” she said. “The tide has turned, the tide has turned.”

Staff Writer Gillian Graham can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 213.