I had thought that my lack of feelings while standing on people would allow me to forget that I had been standing on people, it didn’t. I had no intuition about how these dead Africans might have felt about being paved over, no feelings of ancestral connection to those buried below, and I heard no discernible voices calling to me from the depths of that darkness. I wondered if the woman at the museum had been right. Maybe the corner was just an intersection.
The ambivalence the folks at the Strawbery Banke Museum expressed for those buried beneath Portsmouth’s downtown was all the more surprising when I later learned that the first bodies exhumed from the African Burying Ground had been housed at the museum before they were transported to the temporary laboratory. I assumed that my own lack of feeling was due, in part, to the randomness with which I had selected Portsmouth as the place to try to make sense of the remains of slavery in America. I had no personal connection to New Hampshire, no familial bond to any of the people buried there, and I became certain that was the reason I couldn’t feel anything while standing on those Africans. I thought maybe I needed to visit a slave gravesite more closely related to my life if I was going to experience some true cathexis.
So once back in Rhode Island, I went to a talk given by Theresa Guzmán Stokes at Newport’s Redwood Library about that city’s largest African burial ground, called God’s Little Acre, a gravesite founded in 1747. For more than twenty years, without city support, she had been maintaining its grounds out of personal respect for those buried there, clearing away litter and weeds and eventually establishing a fund to protect it. She runs a website about the cemetery, and she and her husband Keith Stokes, Executive Director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce, are writing a book on the subject.
While introducing his wife, Stokes assured the small audience, We’re not interested in slavery. It’s emotional and it separates people. But the absurdity of slavery means it is practically impossible for anyone to contain all of the contradictions that arise when speaking of it. So despite his promise seconds earlier to refrain from talk of slavery Stokes started by explaining how often the term “servant” is used as a euphemism for “slave” in New England and how there is a presumption that Africans here were somehow “smarter” and treated better than those in the South. This misperception, he pushed, is because people don’t want to remember the dehumanization. Without hesitating he went on to say, Slavery is violent, grotesque, vulgar, and we are all implicated in how it denigrates humanity.
According to a series of articles by Paul Davis running that same week in the Providence Journal, Newport was a hugely significant port in the North Atlantic slave trade and that from 1725 to 1807 more than one thousand trips were made to Africa in which more than one hundred thousand men, women, and children were forced into slavery in the West Indies, Havana, and throughout the American colonies. Guzmán Stokes explained how African people built many of the prominent colonial houses throughout New England, including those in Newport, and while many of those buildings remain restored in one form or another, just a handful of graves of Africans who made this contribution to the town’s development can be found.
On my way to God’s Little Acre, I came upon the tiny Newport Historical Cemetery #9, which Guzmán Stokes had also mentioned during her talk, but I could not figure out which graves belonged to Africans and which belonged to whites. A white woman was taking pictures of stones, so I asked her if she knew. She pointed to two graves in the corner. These over here, she said and then explained she had looked for information on African graves on the web before she left her home in Seattle. The woman told me she was originally from Connecticut, but when she decided to marry an African American man in the 1970s, her family disowned her. She had four children with him, none of whom ever met her parents. She had brought her youngest daughter back East to visit historical sites for a vacation and confessed that she was glad she no longer lived in New England. I couldn’t take all of this “in your face” history. Like Thames Street, the blue stones—she said, referring to the pavers on a road that edges Newport’s harbor—Each one of those stones represents an African. Every stone was from the ballast of a slave ship and was carried by a slave as he or she debarked. When I called the Newport Historical Society to confirm this, Reference Librarian and Genealogist Bert Lippincott III, CG, insisted that stones like that were used as ballast on all ships coming into Newport, not just slave ships. He added, Many Newporters bankrolled ships in the trade, but Newport was not a major destination for slave ships. When I mentioned the article in the Providence Journal that claimed most Africans in colonial Newport were slaves, he said, Many were third-generation Americans. Most were skilled, literate, and worked as house servants.
At God’s Little Acre on the edge of Newport, three stones stand erect, three others appear jackknifed into the ground at a forty-five-degree angle. One lies level to the ground. Only these seven tombstones remain in the graveyard that commemorates the contributions of Africans to the city’s early history. While surrounded on three sides by larger, crowded cemeteries and an eight-foot wrought-iron fence facing Farewell Street, God’s Little Acre is comparatively pastoral, and most of the grave markers are missing as a result of vandalism or landscaping contractors running tractor mowers though it for many years. The inscriptions on those few slate stones still standing are fading due to the way weather and pollution wear on them. Many are now just barely legible.
A white woman with a backpack was taking pictures of the scant stones. She told me she teaches courses on American graveyards at a school in Connecticut. Pointing to one of the graves, she said, He must have been loved by his “family’” because stones were very expensive back then. I wanted to say, So were people. And then I remembered reading an inventory from the estate of Joseph Sherburne whose house has been preserved at the Strawbery Banke Museum. The linens were listed to be worth forty dollars while the African woman who washed and pressed them had a line item value of fifty dollars.
My trip to Newport made me realize that I knew almost nothing about the lives of blacks in Portsmouth during slavery and I wondered if that was the reason I was so unmoved by my visit. So I drove back up to New Hampshire to walk the Black Heritage Trail, put together by a retired schoolteacher and local historian, Valerie Cunningham, in order to learn about the experiences of Africans and African Americans in Portsmouth. Some of the sites on the Black Heritage Trail highlight historic accomplishments of blacks in Portsmouth such as the New Hampshire Gazette Printing Office where Primus, a skilled slave, operated a printing press for fifty years; the Town Pump and Stocks where black leaders were elected in a ritual following loosely from the Ashanti festival tradition of Odwira; and St. John’s Church, where the records indicate that Venus, most likely a poor but free black woman, received a gift of one dollar from the church in 1807 on Christmas Day.
I sat on a bench overlooking the Sarah Mildred Long Bridge, which crosses the Piscataqua River into Kittery, Maine, to where captive Africans would have first encountered Portsmouth, the wharf at what is now Prescott Park. The first known African captive arrived in Portsmouth around 1645 from Guinea, and slave ships started landing regularly as early as 1680 carrying small loads of mostly male children and adolescents. I tried to imagine what it felt like to come into this swiftly-moving river harbor after a long journey across the Atlantic in the cargo hold of a ship—after having been starved, beaten, shackled, and covered in the feculence of the living and dead. Did seeing for the first time the flat, tidy fronts of buildings outlining this colonial settlement make them feel hopeful? So many rectangles. How far away the rest of the world must have seemed.
I ended my walk at the Portsmouth Public Library, which held no significance on the trail, but, according to the first news story I heard about the burial ground, had in its collection a copy of the archaeologists’ report on the burial site. When I asked a reference librarian if I could see it, she hesitated and wanted to know if I planned on making copies. I told her I was not sure if I wanted to make copies because I hadn’t yet seen the report. She then consulted with the head reference librarian who told me that the burial site is a very sensitive issue for the city and that he needed to consult with the City Attorney’s Office before releasing it. He took down
