The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  Samp: the Heart of a Creole Household

  A web of sounds that soon became familiar to a half dozen different cultures, European, African, and American, netted this creole space. Weskhunck, tackhunck, the Algonquian words for a stone or wooden mortar to crush corn, sound like the thud of a pestle pounding all day long. For anthropologists, “creolization” denotes the process of creating hybrid cultures. Applied to people, the English word “creole,” in the seventeenth century, didn’t mean “of mixed race,” a common misconception today. The term was coined in the sixteenth century to describe children of Spanish colonists born in the Americas, and it came to apply loosely to all whose parents had emigrated from Africa and Europe. Although the word sometimes took on racial overtones, throughout the Caribbean it described—and still describes—a culture derived from many sources as well as the region’s people, their language, and their cuisine. In that early sense, the Sylvester children were Atlantic creoles—American-born offspring of foreign parents—just like the black children born on the island. Language kept changing, however, and soon the Sylvester children would become “colonials”; children of African-Indian parentage, “mustees”; and those with both white and African blood, “mulattos.” The ethnic slur “half-breed” was the most common label for the children of white and Indian unions.

  Before the roar of a mill was heard grinding grain on the island or at Nathaniel’s mill in Southold, the thud of pestles produced the food that united everyone in the Sylvesters’ settlement. At its busiest, the plantation fed as many as forty to fifty people. Besides Nathaniel and Grizzell and their children, the numbers included Nathaniel’s brothers Joshua, who lived permanently with the family, and Giles Jr., who stayed there often enough between transatlantic trips to sometimes style himself “of Shelter Island”; Grizzell’s brother Francis; and whatever Quakers were traveling through the colonies to and from New England and Barbados—as well as white indentured servants such as Bernard Collins and up to twenty-four slaves.

  Although they probably never all sat down at once at the same table, we can gather something about community and prejudice from a 1704 journal of a trip from Boston to New York. Madam Knight observed that farmers in coastal Connecticut were “too indulgent (especially the farmers) to their slaves: sufering too great familairity from them, permitting them to sit at Table and eat with them (as they say to save time) and into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand.”

  All drank cider and beer, although as investors in the Azores wine trade, the Sylvesters may also have poured fortified wines such as port and madeira. Fragments of Rhenish pottery jugs and “case bottles” for spirits, with flat sides for easy packing and minimal breakage, have emerged from the dig. Barbadian rum was measured out as pay for Indians and an incentive for slaves. The masters doubtless ate prime cuts of roast meat off pewter plates; the slaves got stew in pottery bowls. Fine Indian cornmeal—nokake—was mixed with water to make the corn porridge called nausamp. Everybody ate the steaming hot “samp,” a comforting bridge between three cultures. Samp was reheated for days, and the lacy brown crust at the edge of the iron kettle was a delicacy. The flavor of the dish varied with the additions of slivered meat or fish.

  A single startling phrase associated with samp—“niggering corn”—conjures up the uglier side of that creole world. The term would have meant nothing to anyone except inhabitants of the western rim of the North Atlantic for a few decades in the colonial period. Before Long Island colonists built gristmills, they used another method for producing cornmeal that was reportedly used by the Indians. A white-oak stump was hollowed out to form a giant mortar, and a heavy block was mounted above it like a pestle, at the end of a hinged pole. The block was raised and dropped again and again, crushing the corn placed inside the stump. It could take a day to pound half a bushel of dry kernels into coarse meal. On Long Island plantations, this arduous, monotonous process became work for slaves.

  The reasons for the existence of slavery, the rationales that whites offered for enslaving blacks, and the treatment slaves endured were constantly redefined in every period of the system’s history as the needs for labor changed in the many different locations where it took hold. Ira Berlin has made famous the distinction between “slave societies,” like that of Barbados, and “societies with slaves,” like New England’s, where slaves were marginal to the central productive processes. Shelter Island plantation between 1651 and 1680 was shaped as a “society with slaves” in two ways: the number of Africans was small by comparison with a West Indian operation, and a single crop, such as sugar, did not form the basis of the economy. But both Africans and Manhansetts were crucial to production.

  In 1652, when the four partners set up their Shelter Island provisioning plantation, three of them—Thomas Rous, Thomas Middleton, and Nathaniel’s brother Constant—were seasoned planters who had been among the first to set up the slave society of Barbados. From the time he had spent there, Nathaniel was somewhat familiar with such large-scale endeavors. But neither he nor any of his partners had any New England experience. Nathaniel, as resident plantation manager, could rely on advice (and English grass seed and breeding stock) for those who, like his brother-in-law William Coddington, had been experimenting for a dozen years in the North, producing crops for export using what labor, slave or free, they could find. According to Nathaniel’s will, however, the three others seem not to have provided enough labor for their start-up operation: “where as the planting field behinde the Orchard Containeing about fourtie akers and the planting feeld called Mannanduck Containing about twentie five akers doth wholly belong unto mee having subdued the same with my owne Estate for want of Negros or other servants to performe it.” Easily as important to Nathaniel as housing were the imperatives of getting the farm and a trade with the West Indies under way. The cost of labor in the colonies was higher than in England. Labor of any kind for hire was scarce, since the abundance of cheap land everywhere meant people wanted to work for themselves, not for others, making white indenture and Indian and black slavery valuable systems. For Nathaniel and his partners, making a go of their provisioning plantation meant helping themselves to labor wherever they found it, and as economically as possible: Africans direct from Africa or from the West Indies; Manhansetts and other local Indians; perhaps Irish slaves from Cromwell’s Irish Wars and the Clearances, as well as a few indentured Europeans. At least one early colonist probably got his Shelter Island start as an indentured servant at the manor: Jacques Guillot, the Frenchman who eventually owned his own farm.

  The Slaughter of the Animals

  Close to the site of Jacques’s ghost outline on the southeast lawn, and some five feet beneath it, the UMass team excavated a deep thirteen-foot-square midden whose contents tell us a great deal about the pressing requirements for labor on the island, and about what it may have meant to some of those who did the work. Once the pit had been filled with trash, it was capped with clay and sand to seal it, perhaps as late as the 1670s. Opened in 2005, the site revealed a scene dating to the earliest period of Sylvester occupation. In one of three dense strata of butchery trash, thousands of fragmentary jaws, teeth, tibias, and skulls attested to a single livestock slaughter. Lab analysis at UMass accounted for some thirteen hogs, plus lesser numbers of cattle, sheep, and goats. Though a small number by contrast with what is slaughtered daily in a commercial abattoir today, it would have required many plantation hands for the job. Specific butchering cuts mean that most of the 1,300 pounds of dressed meat was destined to be salted and barreled for shipment to the West Indies: food for sugar plantation slaves.

  At the center of the upper stratum of the welter of bones, the archaeologists unearthed a large, smooth-bodied clay pot whose neck is heavily collared with distinctive decorative frills, a stylistic innovation that reveals historical information about the period. These embellishments mark it as Fort Shantock ware, named after the first similar pots found at the eponymous Mohegan Indian fort in Connectic
ut. The style spread across Southern New England in the mid- to late seventeenth century (what anthropologists and archaeologists call the “late post-contact period.”) Reading ceramics as cultural history, archaeologists think that the spread of the decorative style may be an affirmation of pan-Indian identity, a blurring of tribal lines as catastrophic losses from epidemic diseases and the Pequot War caused the fragmented native communities to fuse together, and as relations with the English about land and settlement became more hostile.

  Almost half of the vessel remained intact, as if it had been set carefully upright rather than thrown onto the pile as trash. As the pot was carefully removed from the soil and bones surrounding it, a telltale lump halfway down its curved side became visible. It marks the beginnings of a handle, but one structurally so weak it would have been more ornamental than utilitarian. Because pre-contact native pots had no handles, unlike both African and European pots, Steve explained, this vessel dates to the Sylvester plantation era (1651–80) and is testimony to the fusion of the manor’s cultures and experimental identities.

  While Steve suspected that it was most likely heaved into the trash because it was broken, in the same breath he also speculated that the container may have been placed among all these bones for a purpose. His remark made me speculate further than he would have: What did the Manhansetts think of this “provisioning”? The placement of that pot seemed like an acknowledgment of the animals killed here, and a reminder of their own traditions.

  Traditional European slaughters took place in November or December, when livestock was at its fattest. Autumn slaughter fed people through the winter and economized on seasonally scarce fodder. The promise of winter plenty was welcome. But having axed and plucked a few turkeys myself, I know something about what those few cold, early winter days of bloody mayhem felt like. The entire job happened quickly. The beasts were as strong as their butchers: hogs screamed, sheep bleated, heifers mooed wildly. Then the speed and flash of the knife or ax, and the ebb of the struggle, clouds of steam and breath, the stench and stickiness and spatter of blood and guts everywhere. Split-open animals were hung by their hind feet, the way beef quarters are hung in commercial cold lockers today, or as hunters still hang deer. A tall wooden scaffold stands in the back fields of Sylvester Manor, and a buck or a doe, fresh-killed and gutted, hangs there almost every week of deer season. It’s a startling sight, an altar to a distant past.

  Africans and Europeans were accustomed to breeding domestic animals, feeding and caring for them, and then killing them. Cattle, sheep, and hogs all came to North America with the colonists. North American natives kept dogs and sometimes ate them when food was scarce, but had no other domesticated animals. For meat and hides, they relied mostly on deer, and given the opportunity, they would kill as many as they could—fawn, buck, or doe, including the pregnant does. So the Manhansetts were very familiar with killing for food, and with mass killing. In laboring for the Sylvesters, however, they also learned to husband and watch over the plantation’s flocks and herds. Although they were more exquisitely knowledgeable than any Englishman about every detail of the game they hunted, from deer to the smallest rodent, this kind of domestic care was new. They were unsentimental about taking life in order to eat, being strangers neither to death nor to hunger. But they took their game while respecting the rule of Mesingw, “Master of Animals.”

  The historian John Strong, a trusted advocate for the East End Indians today and an expert in their history and lore, describes Mesingw, the “mask being,” whose memory the Lenni Lenape of western Long Island took with them on their forced migrations westward. Strong says that the East End tribes revered this strange and powerful deity who rode through the woods in human guise on the back of a stag. His face had the shape of a large mask, painted black on the left side, red on the right. Black hair covered his body. He watched the hunters, who prayed to him for continued plenty and a successful chase. Mesingw also watched over their quarry, to ensure that they were killed with humility and valor, honor, and gratitude. The rites of supplication enacted before a big deer hunt found everyday counterparts in the continual asking and receiving, the unstinting generosity in Indian culture that almost every European observer remarked on. Anyone who asked for food, shelter, or clothing received it. The same expectations applied to what their gods would provide when ritually asked and thanked.

  * * *

  The early winter darkness falls, and butchering ends for the season. I see Nathaniel turning indoors to his own hearth. Then, while the island’s Manhansetts and Africans dump the last of the bones into the pit, Mesingw gallops soundlessly through the leafless woods, pausing, watching through his narrow masked eyes.

  More than Their Names

  “The history of silence” is a term Steve finds handy to use when artifacts and customs are concealed by those of another, dominant culture. Twenty-four Africans, or the children of Africans, lived as slaves on Shelter Island in 1680, four or five times as many people as were enslaved by any other colonists in the area. (Somewhat unusually, Nathaniel’s will includes the names of both parents, not just the mothers.) But none of the obvious indicators of such a large African presence that the UMass team at first thought they would find, such as cowrie shells, or certain kinds of beads or amulets, or small in-ground storage pits for stashing precious belongings, have been located.

  Kat Hayes has taken this “bundle of silences,” as she calls the gaps in the archaeological record, and made it speak by looking closely at technologies used in Sylvester Manor’s early plantation period to make stone tools, mortar, and ceramics. In ceramics alone, for example, evidence of the heretofore “invisible” first-generation Africans is striking: she concludes that they brought with them expertise that markedly changed the quality of pottery made on the island. Among the 2,400 “native” sherds found at the manor spanning some four thousand years, Kat was able to identify a range of plantation-period examples that show specific differences in temper (the incorporation of ground shells), and firing (higher temperatures and more skilled control). At least one or more of the slaves were probably familiar with common African smelting and ironworking practices; any one of them who had been forced to work as a boiler tender in Barbados was all too familiar with controlling high-temperature fires, the kind needed to fire the thinner, stronger ceramics Kat examined.

  The post-contact wares she analyzed, Kat argues, are only one example of the exchanges between Manhansetts and Africans that have been overlooked as historians (and archaeologists) stressed the singularity of different minority populations. She makes a persuasive argument for “a flow of knowledge” that took place at the seventeenth-century manor in a common social space where “small acts of sharing led to an intertwined history” that existed for more than a hundred years. In the nineteenth century, new political and ethnological takes on colonial history deemed “blood” (as in the “full-blooded Indian”) as the ultimate marker of “race,” producing isolated histories of white, black, and Indian.

  Kat agrees that placing the broken castellated pot so prominently among the bones in the slaughter pit may indeed have been a deliberate act. For the Manhansetts, she says, it may have signified mourning or anger: the slaughter stratum where the pot was found is close to the top of the pit. The clay pipes used by archaeologists as reliable chronological markers that were found in the same layer date to the 1660s or 1670s, so it’s possible to give a date somewhere around the time of “King Philip’s War,” the last large-scale Indian conflict in New England (1675–76). In 1675 a government official observed that Shelter Island’s Indians were “very sullen.” For the slaves, the placement of the Shantock pot with its African handle may well have been an announcement of solidarity with the Manhansetts. The pot shaped by two cultures and set purposely on top of the midden could thus be read as a wordless statement by both minorities. Their captors, the uneasy Sylvesters, would have been alert to any sign of collusion, even one as enigmatic as this.

  But
where was the other direct and incontrovertible evidence we expected about the Africans? Sylvester Manor was the first Northern provisioning plantation to be systematically excavated. Working at first on the supposition that from its beginnings, the Sylvester compound would have included separate slave quarters, Steve and his team dug shovel test pits in the old melon field to the east, in the briars under the pines near the slave cemetery, on the point of the North Peninsula, on a smooth patch of grass close to the barns. “Hindsight being 20/20,” Kat wrote a year after these disappointing attempts, “it now seems clear to us that we fell into the most obvious trap: we were guessing at the location of slave quarters based on what we know from Southern plantation sites, without knowing anything from the written history about how different Northern sites might look.”

  The team had to revise their ideas, and they came to believe that Nathaniel and Grizzell lived with the people they kept in slavery in their own house and its outbuildings. Stunning news. We all slowly comprehended what this meant: a different understanding of personal and social space, the questionable preservation of African languages and family structure (even the neat nuclear families in Nathaniel’s will began to look different), queries about cross-cultural exchanges and compromises in the close confines of the house, about the meanings of race and class structure. So how was this situation “racial” if Africans were not segregated from Europeans? (Until it became very clear from the mass of evidence that the Manhansetts also played an intimate role, we consistently left them out of the domestic equation.) It would take years—nine to be exact, until Kat finished her thesis—to parse the subtle evidence of what “living together” might have meant at the manor. Even then, as many intriguing questions as solid answers remain.