of residence, and school affiliation—then asked me to wait while he placed the call.
The librarian was worried about how I might represent Portsmouth in a piece on the subject because he cared about the town. I liked the town, too. It is pretty, easy to navigate, and surprisingly friendly for New England. I felt guilty and ashamed about my affinity for the town because at the time I could not muster more than a diffuse intellectual identification with the people who were buried just a few streets over.
Before copying the report, I remembered how easy it was for me to ignore what was already obvious, so I wrote down some details to remind myself of what I shouldn’t forget: people were carried like chattel on ships to America; they were sold to other people; they were stripped of their names, spiritual practices, and culture; they worked their entire lives without just compensation; they were beaten into submission and terrorized or killed if they chose not to submit; when they died they were buried in the ground at the far edge of town; and as the town grew, roads and houses were built on top of them as if they had never existed.
I spent the long summer with my friends at the beach, drinking Bloody Marys and eating lobster rolls on the open-air deck of a clam shack in Galilee, Rhode Island, while the Block Island Ferry, serried with tourists, made its lethargic heave past the docked commercial fishing boats. Once school started, I turned my attention back to the spiritless tedium of lesson planning and grading papers. In all that time I did not once touch the archaeologists’ report.
I could make something up about why I let the report sit in a manila folder on my desk for nine months without ever once attempting to read it—something about wanting to let the dead rest or about how loneliness swells and recedes—but I won’t. The reason is not clear to me even now. What I do know is that holding the copy I had made of the report near the Xerox machine by the dimly lit front door of the Portsmouth Public Library that previous spring made me feel more than I had felt during any of my gravesite visits, like a balloon in my chest was expanding and taking up all the space I normally used to breathe.
Intense discomfort, I had thought. Maybe that’s enough.
But by January I was driving back up to Portsmouth, irritated with myself for not reading the copy of the report I had already made but even more irritated with myself for not being able to let it go unread. The once tattered and gloomy public library had moved to a brilliant new building a few streets over, and as I walked around the landscapers installing the brick steps, I caught the sign on the door that said, Welcome to Your New Library. In the breezeway, three junior high school girls gathered around a computer terminal and giggled. A woman in a purple cardigan greeted me from behind the circulation desk with a smile and thin wave. Seduced by all of it, I thought, I love my new library.
When I asked the reference librarian about the report, he told me it was now shelved in the local history section in the regular stacks. I thought, Now it’s all out in the open. Now there’s nothing to hide. I grabbed it off the wall, took a seat at one of the new blond reading tables and thumbed through it lightly as if it were a mere tabloid magazine. I took notes from the acknowledgments, introduction, and background chapters, but when I got to the section describing the removal of the coffins—those same pages I had copied nearly a year before—a shrill noise came up from the back of my throat at the pitch of a full tea kettle in a rolling-boil whistle. I cleared my throat and went back to reading, but my din started again. It was sharp enough for anyone to hear, so I decided I had better leave—but not before making a fresh copy of the report to take with me.
When a story is unpleasant, it is hard to focus on details that allow you to put yourself in the place of the subject because the pain of distortion starts to feel familiar. Paying attention often requires some sort of empathy for the subject, or at the very least, for the speaker. But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves. Or because empathy requires us to dig way down into the murk, deeper than our own feelings go, to a place where the boundaries between our experience and everyone else’s no longer exist.
Archaeologists removed the remains of thirteen people from beneath the intersection of Chestnut and Court Streets with the help of some machinery, but they did most of the digging by hand. Once in the laboratory, they used potter’s tools and paintbrushes to remove excess soil from the bones and teeth. The exact dates associated with each burial remain unknown, but it is assumed that all were interred during the eighteenth century. Four males and one female could be identified by sex, but they found it impossible to determine the sex of the other eight, though most were believed to be in early adulthood, between the ages of twenty-one and forty years. Heads of the deceased generally faced west, suggesting a burial in the Christian tradition. In no cases were all the bones of an individual represented, perhaps due to the commingling of remains during previous installations of gas and sewer lines, the stacking of coffins, or a high water table in the soil. Thus no cause of death could be determined for any of those recovered. Archaeologists noted, however, that the lack of visible traumatic defects, cut marks, fresh or healed fractures does not rule out the presence of trauma. The teeth of each person, which in several cases constituted the entirety of the remains, appeared to be better preserved than their bones, which were found wet, free of flesh, colored gray or black and, in the case of long bones, often missing the ends.
Pieces of the skull, portions of the upper and lower limbs, shoulder girdle, ribs, spine, and pelvis of a male person between the ages of twenty-one and thirty years represent Burial 1. An excavator operator noticed his leg bones sticking out from the bottom of his coffin, which was made of white pine and was hexagonal in shape. All of his mandibular and some of his maxillary teeth were present, but like most of those recovered at the site, his teeth exhibit traces of enamel hypoplasia, a sign of previous infection or nutritional stress. His bones revealed a calcified blood vessel in his right lower leg and prolonged shin splints. A pumpkin seed of unexplained significance was found in his coffin as well as a metal object, probably a shroud pin, suggesting he was naked at burial.
In Burial 2, the remains of another male person between twenty-one and twenty-six years of age were found in good condition despite the fact that part of his skull had been unintentionally crushed by the excavator, leaving only his mandible and several teeth. A gas line running through the foot portion of his coffin meant that many bones in his right foot also were missing. His body was slumped to the left side, probably due to his coffin being tipped during burial, and his hipbone was broken in several places. His right hand lay over his thigh. Further analysis of his bones showed signs of repetitive forearm rotation and possible inflammation of the right leg, presumably from heavy shoveling, lifting, or other strenuous work. Salt, either used as a preservative before burial or for some other ritual, and a single tooth of unknown origin found between his knees, further distinguished his remains.
Burial 3 contained the remains of a person of indeterminate sex, thought to be approximately thirty to fifty years of age with the head facing east, perhaps toward Mecca. Archaeologists recovered only extremely fragile fragments of the cranium and major long bones. The part of the mandible that was still intact suggests participation in a West African puberty ritual as there is a long-healed-over gap where lower and lateral incisors would have been. Stains in the soil represented most of the coffin wood. Only thirty teeth, small fragments of bone, some wood and coffin nails accounted for the person of twenty-one to forty years of age in Burial 4. Those remains were extremely damaged by erosion and the unintentional intrusion of the excavator.
Pipe laid around 1900 across the bottom of the coffin of the male person aged twenty-one to forty in Burial 5 eventually disintegrated his lower extremities. Shovel marks on the coffin base indicate where a crew member either hit his coffin accidentally or attempted to cut through it.
The head of the female person in Burial 6 was located under the sidewalk, which had to be caved in to allow for her removal. Only the upper portion of her coffin was found intact. Her lower legs, cut off where they intersected with a utility trench and a
