by Mac Griswold
Common housing also turned out to have been the case for the very earliest planters of Virginia and Maryland, whose history of shared space has generally been obscured by later practices. At Rich Neck Plantation, an intact seventeenth-century site, archaeologists uncovered movements through space told in the marks of fence lines erected by three different owners between the early 1640s and the 1680s. Rich Neck’s initial configuration (seventeen slaves living with their owners and white servants in two structures, main house and kitchen, on a single fenced acre) was similar to Sylvester Manor’s in Nathaniel and Grizzell’s day. Archaeologists used the evidence of lines of Virginia postholes to chart the advance of fences across the land, tracing how slaves moved out of the “big house” into the separated spaces that became a signature of the Southern plantation as early as the 1670s, as the perceived need for the owners’ privacy, increasing racialization, and the numbers of slaves increased. But Northern landowners cultivated fewer acres than in the South, experienced shorter crop seasons, and planted multiple crops that, unlike tobacco, didn’t require year-round attention. Therefore they owned fewer slaves. At Sylvester Manor, masters and slaves appear to have lived together at least until the mid-eighteenth century.
In shared accommodations such as those at Rich Neck and Sylvester Manor, which anthropologists call “contested spaces,” people from different cultures played out day-to-day dramas with “the other.” Depending on who you were, the act of simply stepping into a room or walking through a garden could hold immensely different significance. The design of buildings is always freighted with meaning, and Africans, no less than anyone else, saw living spaces as symbolic. The manor house the Sylvesters erected—perhaps after converting the temporary settlement of the 1650s into an auxiliary work site or tearing it down—advertised their status as gentry and masters and their intention to create something that would last. For first-generation slaves especially, that alien assemblage of space and materials must have felt uncomfortable and intimidating. Sleeping on a straw mattress in the attic, on a stair landing, in dark corners and dank storerooms, or huddling in barn lofts where oxen, horses, and sheep breathed welcome animal heat up between the floorboards, Africans encountered daily reminders of how far they had traveled from home.
For the Sylvesters, the identity of Shelter Island’s first black community must necessarily have been based partly on assessments of slaves’ abilities and skills, and maybe even on their character—unknown valuations that mattered most when the plantation was running full steam. (After Nathaniel’s death, those human lives were appraised purely at market price: a total valuation of £258, the third-highest amount on the list after the land and livestock.)
But how to find out what the slaves thought of themselves and their labor? Within the black community, and certainly more important to them than what their employers thought, the first black Shelter Islanders would have first based their identities on kinship, and on whatever status each person might have possessed within his or her own society. Crafts such as ironworking and animal husbandry passed down from generation to generation within families much as they did in European guilds. Africans probably came to Shelter Island with diverse skills and acquired more as the decades passed, and those skills were part of what defined identity—for themselves as well as for the Sylvesters.
Since social identity is shaped and constantly reshaped in the practices of daily life, we must briefly look at the dry phrases of Nathaniel’s will to see what they might reveal about the identity of Shelter Island’s black community. Kvamme’s data has indicated the presence of various structures crowding the west slope down to the inlet: the cider press and cider mill, salt house, barn, and warehouse all noted in Nathaniel’s will would have stood on or near the waterfront for loading the plantation’s products and unloading the incoming sugar, salt, and manufactured goods, Nathaniel’s trade staples. The smallest details give insight into the qualities and skills required for daily life and work. For example, brickmaking, burning charcoal, and slaking lime for mortar require knowledge of specific technologies. Loading vessels required more than muscles. Although a puncheon of molasses could weigh 1,300 pounds, a sack of flour some 280 pounds, and a barrel of salt beef half a ton, each had to be carefully placed in a small boat, then heaved or winched up and over the gunwales of the large ship out in the deep harbor. Breaking a restive young horse took intelligence, dexterity, courage, and patience. Shuttling livestock on and off the island by boat was a dangerous test of reflexes and timing. Horses had to be shod, farm equipment constructed and repaired, and iron hoops made for wooden casks.
Whatever staves for barrels or water buckets or other vital containers a black cooper or carpenter could turn out were probably for use on the island. In the early years, producing staves in the near-industrial quantities needed for West Indies sugar, molasses, and rum would have taken away from the essential work of setting up the plantation, so Nathaniel looked off-island, apparently without much initial success. He wrote several times to John Winthrop Jr., hoping to have “a prsell [of staves] from yor towne [New London],” and to pay for them with “Salt and English Goods” that he expected to receive shortly at Shelter Island. But by the 1660s he was shipping thousands of staves from Southold.
Tammero (or Tomeo), the husband of Oyou and father of four children, may have been one of the three indispensable men on the Shelter Island plantation. His name, like other African names in the documents, offers little clue as to his African identity. Tomeo may be the standard form for Bartolomeo, indicating that he, like Jacquero, is an Atlantic creole who came to the Americas through the Iberian slave trade. But whatever his ethnicity, perhaps Tammero proudly acknowledged it, just as Oyou might have said “I am Oyo” when she described herself, meaning she came from the powerful Oyo Empire, an inland state the size of England in what is now Nigeria. If we can suppose for a minute that these two guesses are true, we are looking at what happened often in America and surely on Shelter Island also: two people from different cultures, each of whom spoke a native language as well as a creole lingua franca, were creating a new domestic order and a new collective identity for themselves and their children.
Division of Slave Families According to the Will of Nathaniel Sylvester, 1680
Sylvester Manor Archives and Shelter Island Historical Society Copy of Will
ENSLAVED
SYLVESTER FAMILY MEMBERS TO WHOM THEY WERE ASSIGNED IN 1680, WHEN FAMILIES WERE BROKEN UP
Jacquero and Hannah
Grizzell Sylvester (wife of Nathaniel)
Hope
Grizzell Sylvester (wife)
Isabell
Elizabeth Sylvester (daughter)
Tony and Nannie
Giles Sylvester (son)
Hester
Patience Sylvester (daughter)
Abbey
Mary Sylvester (daughter)
Grace
Ann Sylvester (daughter)
Semnie
Mercie Sylvester (daughter)
Japhet and Semnie
Nathaniel Sylvester II (son)
Tammero and Oyou
Peter Sylvester (son)
Child 1
Constant Sylvester (son)
Child 2
Constant Sylvester (son)
Child 3
Benjamin Sylvester (son)
Child 4*
Benjamin Sylvester (son)
Black John and Maria
Grizzell Sylvester (wife)
Prescilla
Grizzell Sylvester (wife)
J.O. and Marie
Grizzell Sylvester (wife)
Negro Jenkin
Grizzell Sylvester (wife)
In March 1680, when the Quaker convert Nathaniel Sylvester wrote his will, the family and community bonds of most of those listed here were given little consideration.
*One of these children is Obium (d. 1757); another probably Tom as per Isaac Arnold and James Lloyd to Nathaniel Sylvester II, Sept. 20, 1687, SMA
, NYU, I/A/140/20.
The binding conditions of ownership in Nathaniel’s will demonstrate his high regard for Tammero. “Whereas Tammero the Negro was … formerly my owne,” Nathaniel wrote, “[I] yeelded [him] to goe into partnership [with brother Constant and Thomas Middleton],” but only on the condition that “he should upon dividing of the Negros in partnership be returned to mee againe as my owne negro.” If Tammero had been on Shelter Island since the partnership began in 1652, as Nathaniel’s will implies, it means he might have lived there for thirty-six years. The place must have become his home. The premature death in 1697 of a Sylvester son, Peter, to whom Tammero had been bequeathed, caused yet another loss. Tammero, his wife, and one of their sons, Obium—the one black islander of his generation known to read and write—were sold to James Lloyd, the husband of Nathaniel and Grizzell’s daughter Grizzell, who lived in Boston. As Michael Gomez notes in Exchanging Our Country Marks, each African who was enslaved came out of a “socially stratified, ethnically based identity directly tied to a specific land.” But on Shelter Island, Africans were forced to learn that skin color alone would henceforth define them in the eyes of their captors.
Symoney, Semnie, Siminje, Simene
In early April 1674, Captain Richard Smith of Narragansett, Rhode Island, owner of a thriving Indian trading post and a friend of the Sylvesters and the Coddingtons, wrote to Fitz John Winthrop, the Connecticut governor’s son. Describing a trading trip around Long Island Sound, Smith said, “We had some good fraight on board namely, Mistress Sylvester and her daughter Mistress Grisell, and negro Symoney to attend them, whom we saufly landed at Rhode Island.”
“Negro Symoney” sounds like a known figure; she was not merely “a negro,” or a nameless servant. She was included in the “good fraight.” On this trip, Symoney accompanied the Sylvester women as a lady’s maid, meaning she was familiar with the exalted routines of dressing the two Grizzells and herself for a visit to the Coddingtons in Newport. “Mistress Sylvester” was by this time thirty-eight years old, a settled matron; she may then have been pregnant with her last baby, Benjamin. “Mistress Grisell,” eighteen and highly marriageable, was a year older than her mother had been when she left Newport for Shelter Island as a bride, so Symoney may have doubled as a watchful duenna. Smith’s jocular tone suggests that this was a pleasure jaunt for the three women breaking out of Shelter Island’s winter isolation, when the strait of the Peconic Bay between Shelter Island and Southold often froze solid. The closed circle of Symoney’s two worlds—her own family on the island and the Sylvesters, with whom she lived in claustrophobic intimacy—opened out, in Newport, to include other companions, black and white.
The presence of Symoney’s uncommon name, alternatively written as Semnie or Semenie, in Nathaniel’s will may offer a glimpse of a slave exercising a rare privilege—naming a child, as the will also records a second Semnie among the other slaves. One, a married woman listed without children, is probably the person who traveled to Newport. The other is a girl whose three sisters had conventional English names. What are the odds of two people having this unusual name, just by chance, on tiny Shelter Island in 1680? One scholar has proposed that the senior Semnie is the grandmother, but even if the two are not related by blood, it seems pretty clear that little Semnie’s parents must have named her after the elder woman. Eighteen years later, when the first census was taken on the East End, there they are, the two Semnies together in Southold. Their Shelter Island society had vanished with the deaths of Nathaniel and Grizzell. But the power of their name lived on in the baptismal and death records of the East End. The name repeats like a tolling bell once in every generation down to 1805, then fades to silence. Semnie, Symoney, Semonie, Semone, Simene, Simmany.
“Semnie” appears in no dictionary of proper names—English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch—and if it is African, corruption has taken it far from a recognizable original. The only name I’ve found that even comes close is Siminje (pronounced “See-MIN-yeh”), that of a Guyanese Indian woman enslaved in Barbados in the 1640s. One clue as to why this odd name may have had such a long life comes from Richard and Sally Price, anthropologists steeped in the history of the Guyanas and the world of the Saramaka Maroons (still-extant forest communities in Suriname founded in the seventeenth century by Africans who successfully escaped slavery). The Prices offered a word used by the Saramakans in the African secret language, Komanti: sêminí or osêminí, which refers to a class of warrior spirits. Perhaps the name traveled from Africa to the forests of South America to Shelter Island; whatever route it took, the name casts a spell of spiritual power. On the Shinnecock Indian Nation’s reservation in Southampton, Long Island, old “Poppy” Terry, who claimed to be the grandson of a Barbadian slave, called his wife, a Long Island native whose real name was Thelma, Semmie until the day she died in 2005.
11
IN THE GROUND
Under the Pines
In the vault, sorting through stacks of early-twentieth-century letters, I open a small envelope without a name or address. It contains four half-sized sheets covered in Cornelia Horsford’s loopy, acrobatic scrawl. Cornelia inherited the manor upon her mother’s death in 1903. Her letter is dated Sylvester Manor, August 26, 1915, but has no salutation. I keep reading, hoping for clues regarding Cornelia’s correspondent, although I don’t expect to find more than family gossip. Indeed, the letter describes a visit to the manor by a cousin, General Sylvester Dering II. But on page three Cornelia writes, “I took him to see the old slave burying ground which grows more interesting day by day as new graves are brought to light from under the heavy brush, some mounds, some fallen in, all with their headstones and footstones.” Headstones and footstones? Unbelievable. No headstones or footstones have ever been remarked on by anyone as far as I know. The fenced “African burial ground,” as the archaeologists call it, is now kept weed-whacked to a shaggy twelve inches or so; all that honors the two hundred or so people reportedly interred there are the fence and the boulder monument with its carved inscription, BURYING GROUND OF THE COLORED PEOPLE OF THE MANOR SINCE 1651.
I read Cornelia’s breathtaking sentence to a student archaeologist, Elizabeth Newman, who is helping me with the document inventory. The two of us drop everything and head outside to investigate through a sleety rain. We pound up the soggy, puddled drive to the graveyard under the pines and fumble our way through the gate, half expecting to find regular mounds and hollows, headstones and footstones, where we’ve never seen them before. Neither; nothing. Just brambles, withered field grasses, and poison ivy on the uneven ground. As we walk around, wondering what lies beneath our feet in this sacred space, we stare down at every step, feeling gullible, disconsolate. Elizabeth kicks a small stone like a kid. Then she says, “God, there are so many rocks in here, I guess because this area hasn’t been tilled, and the glacial rocks haven’t been cleared…” Her voice trails off, and a light goes on. The two of us—she, an archaeologist, and I, a landscape historian—are used to scrutinizing the earth for different patterns. We missed this one until Cornelia gave us the clue: we are stumbling over an army of small glacial boulders and fieldstone pebbles, many more, at a cursory glance, than anyplace else we have examined on the property. The largest have rolled or been rolled against the fence; the little ones are scattered underfoot, many half buried in the ice-glazed soil. Are these Cornelia’s “headstones and footstones”? Early Dutch settlers on Long Island used fieldstones as grave markers, sometimes carving them with names or initials and dates. As part of their doctrine of “plainness,” or simplicity, early Quakers sometimes also placed such uncarved stones on graves, although the very earliest Friends, such as Grizzell and Nathaniel, apparently chose burial without markers of any kind. The body was a vessel for the soul, and when the soul was gone, the body had no meaning.
The inscription “Burying Ground of the Colored People of the Manor Since 1651” was probably carved on a glacial erratic boulder in 1884, when the current generation o
f Sylvester descendants publicly celebrated their Brinley and Sylvester ancestors and the manor itself. The boulder lies next to the fenced burying ground and is visible from the drive.
The people laid to rest in the “Burying Ground of the Colored People” underwent what the historian Orlando Patterson has famously called “social death,” meaning that the society in which they lived rejected them as full human beings. But as they lie here, unmarked, they are also vividly present. As Jerome Handler and Ira Berlin have written about funeral practices in the Caribbean and the North American colonies, the slaves’ exclusion from segregated white cemeteries meant that their own graveyards became free spaces, repositories of African religious and cultural traditions. Resourceful, thoughtful people, slaves used funeral rites to remember the arts of dying and the chain of ancestors that connected them to their homelands.