by Mac Griswold
For the first Africans and their American-born children on Shelter Island, this ground would have meant something quite different from what it meant for the Sylvesters. It seems entirely unlikely that Nathaniel and Grizzell, despite their Quaker sensibilities, would have been sensitive to African cultural traditions. Although they had the upper hand—after all, they could physically punish or sell troublesome slaves, or ship them back to the West Indies, the ultimate threat—the Sylvesters were nonetheless far outnumbered. Practically speaking, in order to extract labor and ensure their own safety from those they held in bondage, they had no choice but to reach some kind of accommodation: perhaps more lenient treatment, better food, an increased rum ration, extra liberties, a gift of new clothing—or the chance to name a child. In considering the role of the African “guardians” whom slaver captains employed to control their captives aboard ship (and Shelter Island was like a ship, separated by water and with its sole authority, Nathaniel, as captain), Stephanie Smallwood writes, “Presumably, a preventive strategy was not only the best defense against slave insurrection, but also arguably the only reliable defense.” The Sylvesters, by following a custom that had originated in Barbados—authorizing a place for slaves to bury their own dead—legitimized one outlet for powerful emotions.
There’s no record of major uprisings, murders, or massacres occurring on Shelter Island during the entire history of slavery on the island, as first happened in New York City in 1712, when some twenty-five to fifty black men and women met at midnight to carry out the first stages of a well-organized plot to kill all the whites and destroy the city. Nine whites were killed; after the rebellion ended, thirty-one rebels were dead. Six had committed suicide; twenty-four were hanged, burned, or broken on the wheel; and the last, a pregnant woman, was allowed to give birth before she, too, was executed. The events of 1741, in which more than a hundred black New Yorkers were imprisoned, more than two dozen executed, and seventy sold as slaves in the Caribbean, has been shown by the historian Jill Lepore to be less a conspiracy than a hysterical overreaction to a (mostly imagined) plot. Despite subsequent restrictive legislation, urban slaves continued to gather in numbers, in defiance of the law.
Enslaved people nonetheless would have had many ways to retaliate short of outright rebellion: they could break or steal tools, pretend to be sick, or, in innumerable ways, do a work slow-down, interfering with the economic health of the plantation, despite whatever punishment might have been offered, including the cat-o’-nine-tails. Shelter Island’s social dynamic probably involved delegating some authority to a trusted slave, already a leader in the black community, someone with a facility for language—African (particularly Akan), Creole, or newly acquired Algonquian, and of course English or Dutch—who could be counted on to inform Nathaniel of any threats to him and his family. No arms are listed in Nathaniel’s inventory—were they locked up? As a Quaker who eschewed violence, did he have none? We don’t know, but the absence is surprising. Through whatever means, a delicate balance seemingly held between the couple and their large black labor force.
Since the discovery of New York’s African Burial Ground in 1991, other Northern slave burial sites, both private and public, have been identified and tidied up. In Orient, New York—a fifteen-minute ferry ride across Peconic Bay from Shelter Island—the Hog Pond Cemetery, which dates to the 1830s, recently acquired a new historical sign and had the toppled boulders of its old wall reset. Within it, the two imposing carved monuments of Dr. Seth Tuthill and his wife, Maria, face those of their “former servants,” with whom the white couple wished to be buried, according to oral history and family research. The disparity between the masters’ smooth tablets and their ex-slaves’ blank, rough fieldstones in neat rows embodies a “family” hierarchy that the Tuthills, despite their apparent ecumenicism, would clearly have felt uncomfortable about erasing on earth, if not in heaven.
In this cemetery under the pines, investigation has at last begun: in March 2013 UMass initiated geophysical testing, the most respectful and least invasive initial approach. The site may have been an Indian burial sanctuary long before the Sylvesters and Africans arrived—Manhansetts and Montauketts reportedly lie there too. Although the manor team has been very careful to keep good relations with local tribal councils, they are understandably uneasy about allowing anyone to disturb the peace of the dead here: they have fresh memories of other Indian graveyards on the East End that were discovered in the course of construction and hastily covered up without ceremony. If testing indicates that human remains are present at the manor, archaeological excavation will proceed with tribal assent. Body positions and funeral ornaments may clarify the ethnicity of any remains; signs of age and gender may emerge; the effects of labor and nutrition may turn up in teeth and bones—although in the island’s acid soil, “remains” might only be stains in the sand. Some corpses may have been buried only in shrouds, others in coffins. As at New York City’s African Burial Ground, buttons and other fasteners may indicate what the dead wore to their graves; beads with sacred African meanings may be found looped around wrists and waists. The pattern of pins underground may show how a vanished shroud was carefully folded. In the African Burial Ground, the body of an infant cradled in the crook of its dead mother’s arm had a tiny shroud secured with many more pins than necessary, as if the multitude of fasteners marked an outpouring of protectiveness.
“Byron Griffing [Shelter Island’s town supervisor, 1892–1905] has the names, which I mean to have carved on a rough boulder on the crest of the slope at the head of Julia’s grave,” Cornelia’s letter continued. No stone confirms the presence of the remains of Julia Dyd Havens Johnson, the manor’s longtime housekeeper and the daughter of a former slave, who died in 1907. And the only known monument, at the bottom of the slope near the driveway, fails to record a single name. This incident is a perfect illustration of why archaeologists point out how misleading documentary evidence can be. Plans that get written down don’t always get carried out. A search for Cornelia’s list of names and for Griffing’s records produced discouraging news: the farmhouse where his papers were stored was burned to the ground. The list, if it existed, was lost.
I’m angry at Cornelia’s careless exaggeration about proper headstones and footstones, and her inability to carry through with honoring Julia, someone Cornelia had known all her life. Given that people so often don’t do what they say, rage seems unreasonable. Yet both Cornelia’s professed good intention and her inaction put her gesture where it belongs: in the category of condescending and sentimental racism typical of her class and day.
“The Negro Garden”
If death, its rituals, and the dense shade of the pines have consecrated the “Burying Ground of the Colored People of the Manor,” everyday life, the seasonal rites of agriculture, and bright sunlight hallow the spot of earth that two nineteenth-century manor proprietors called the Negro Garden. For their makers, both grave and garden carried the sweetness of order, an order that the slaves themselves created out of the disorder and powerlessness of their lives. In death, Africans believed, the spirits of those they buried would be free to return to Africa; every spring, the seeds they chose to plant on Shelter Island would sprout from the ground. Digging the first spadeful of earth—the same act performed in both places, life and death answering each other—restored harmony and gravitas to the world.
In a daybook entry for May 7, 1856, three years before his death in 1859, Samuel Smith Gardiner, the husband of Nathaniel and Grizzell’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Mary L’Hommedieu, noted matter-of-factly that he “Planted Six rows of corn in the Negro garden.” By then, twenty-nine years after the end of slavery in New York State, the term “Negro garden” had lost its original sense as the only ground that plantation slaves were permitted to cultivate for themselves. But when the first Sylvesters began to import Africans, probably through the West Indies, both masters and slaves would have known of such plots in Barbados. While traces and records of m
any “Negro gardens” can be found on plantations in the South, few besides this one have even been mentioned in the North, where plantations run with slave labor were fewer to start with, and where, once free African Americans decamped for the cities, the ground was used for other purposes.
Those gardens provided more than physical sustenance. The Barbadian planter Henry Drax instructed his overseer, “For the enabling Negroes to go through their work with cheerfulness there must be great care taken that they have plantation provisions enough, besides the constant provision-ground of their own. The quantity and most convenient place for the Negroes Garden you must allot, which should be in the outskirts of the plantation.” Drax added that better food—particularly food they’d grown themselves—made his slaves better workers.
But what crops familiar to Africans from a tropical climate could survive on Shelter Island? First on the list would have been Indian corn, or maize. This Native American grain, introduced into West Africa by the Portuguese as early as the second half of the sixteenth century, was loaded into the holds of slave ships as a durable staple food for the long westward passage. Slaves would also have been familiar with beans, yams, sorghum, and squash in Africa, some of which had originally been brought from the Americas by Europeans. They could have grown these plants for themselves on Shelter Island, particularly with Manhansett collaboration and encouragement in adapting to the climate.
Creating “social death” for Africans in America required shearing off the African past. The naked, possessionless people who stumbled off slave ships were regarded by the white colonials who greeted them as blanks, except for crude general observations as to which Africans were strongest or most suited to certain kinds of labor, or which were more likely to rebel. Similarly, American colonists conveniently classed the land they were claiming as an uncultivated wilderness, even though Indian land management was both sophisticated and intensive. Both false concepts were useful for Europeans intent on framing themselves as the legitimate masters of the new territory and its inhabitants.
African American scholars had long written in specialized journals about the role of Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World (to borrow John Thornton’s title). But it was only in the 1970s, after the civil rights movement and the publication of Philip Curtin’s seminal The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), that a wave of contemporary historians began to look backward for what anthropologists call habitus, the system of socialization beginning in childhood that weaves person and place into a single sociocultural structure. In the context of Africans arriving on Shelter Island in the 1650s and 1660s, habitus could mean things as diverse as carrying a body memory of how they held themselves in pride, sorrow, or joy, or of how to behave toward children and elders, or how to recognize familiar plants such as maize or any leafy plants that resembled callaloo, favored greens in the West Indies. Not all familiar crops would have thrived. Even if an African captive somehow managed to smuggle a root of cassava, the bread of the tropics, to Shelter Island, frost would have killed it.
The African Garden site excavated by the University of Massachusetts team may be that of “the Negro Garden,” as Samuel Gardiner called it in 1856. The area faces south on a gentle slope, with a low-tide spring nearby.
The first arrivals in colonial America, European and African alike, sought replication, not adaptation—until they learned that adaptation meant survival. “One is not born with a disposition to recollect,” writes the neurologist Oliver Sacks. “This comes only with changes and separations in life—separations from people, from places, from events and situations, especially if they have been of great significance, have been deeply hated or loved … Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the place where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place or the life we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed.”
So where on Shelter Island was this locus of love, labor, and memory, the “Negro garden”? Samuel Gardiner’s bare notation gave no clue. We had to depend on his less reassuringly literal son-in-law, Eben Norton Horsford. Writing thirty years after Gardiner’s daybook entry, he described the paths, tidal spring, shoreline indentations, and Indian village and graveyard of the North Peninsula, finishing with a flourish: “Between the spring and the end of the graveyard, runs the old hawthorn hedge, the office of which has been evident as it forms the limit of the Negro Garden, immemorially so called, and indicated the distance to which the servants might extend their spading the ground.” (Horsford applied the word “servant,” as did both Nathaniel Sylvester and Andy Fiske, to enslaved as well as free laborers.) There are now a number of paths, springs, and silted-up marshy areas but no visible signs of Manhansett burials or a hedge, as the entire peninsula has become a weedy succession forest.
The first tantalizing clue on the ground appeared when Steve and two graduate students, Anne Hancock and Lee Priddy, who would help lead the first summer of exploratory fieldwork, drove down from Boston on a cold March day in 1998. We walked together across the land bridge to the North Peninsula, which Steve, on the basis of the Gardiner and Horsford descriptions, had picked as a dig site for the season. Over the winter the ground had frozen, then thawed, heaving up stones and artifacts. We crossed the deep-cut old wagon road that runs from the stone bridge to the far side of the North Peninsula. Anne stooped down for the first find, a piece of a white-and-red-glazed pot. Then, quite a few steps farther on, she picked up a sherd that fitted it exactly. Lee spotted something brownishly different from the brown leaves and soil. She turned it over in her hand, and then, in a star turn only an archaeologist can pull off, said, “It’s a piece of a clay colander, glazed inside, unglazed outside. The irregular holes tell me it dates to the seventeenth century.” On track to become an archaeologist from childhood, Lee had been washing potsherds at Colonial Williamsburg since she was fifteen. I held the fragment in my hand: it became the fine indented foot and fat belly of a colander basin. The interior glaze gleamed. It looked rather like the colanders at Williams-Sonoma.
For Steve, Anne, and Lee, as historical archaeologists, this was only a piece of a European utensil without a material frame of reference to tie it to a specific ethnic use or period of manor settlement. It could have been brought to the North Peninsula at any time since it was made. It could have been dumped here as a broken piece. For me, this colander was a gathering basket. Garden produce is picked, washed, and sorted in a colander. Were we in the Africans’ garden? I felt the tension between the archaeologists’ thoughts and mine.
“Ground-truthing” is the term archaeologists automatically reach for when information they receive from outside a dig—from documents, for example—must be verified against what they find with shovel and trowel, followed by microscopic or chemical analysis. It’s not just that archaeologists are a skeptical lot, suspicious of anything outside their own discipline (which they are), or that they chafe under what they perceive to be the unfair primacy of history as a discipline (which they do). It’s also that they have a valid point. A written description in a letter like Cornelia’s, or even in a court order dangling with seals, won’t yield the same truth as the earth. As for geophysical testing—it produces “evidence,” all right. For example, “resistance” (a change in soil compaction) on the West Lawn near the water did mean that Kvamme’s testing gadget had registered a different material composition—but what material, exactly? What might first promise to be the footprint of the long-sought seventeenth-century warehouse may easily turn out to be nineteenth-century cast-iron pipes, as did in fact happen at the manor. Often only digging will tell.
For archaeologists, an area of flat ground may indicate past habitation and use. Absent other indicators, when first scanning a prospective site, their eyes rest on level areas. I began to read every flat place on the North Peninsula as an Indian village, or a plot that the Africans of the first generation gardened. Rereading Horsford’s descriptio
n of the North Peninsula, though, I found it confusing and vague; I wasn’t sure he was actually describing this peninsula as the site of the Negro Garden. Could it have been closer to the seventeenth-century house? Every linear hump or ridge in the lawns around the existing house could mark a vanished fencerow; each line of more than four trees, no matter what the species, began to look like the ghost of a hedge. The landscape seemed unwilling to give up its secrets, or even to admit it had any secrets. It was time for me to give up on looking for the Negro Garden for a while and return to the documents.
* * *
It’s May 2000, and I’m staring out the window of the ground floor back bedroom, my workroom. I’ve been sorting, transcribing, and inventorying Sylvester family papers since 1997, the year that Steve first visited the manor, even though I’m not sure that the story I’m interpreting from these fragments is a story, or makes sense, or is true. I tell myself, “I must not exaggerate; I must not underestimate.” Is it too big a picture for me to comprehend? From the canals of Northern Europe and the slave castles of the African Gold Coast the line runs to this handsome, smallish house whose serene forehead also hides secrets, and to scientists and poets in nineteenth-century Cambridge, Massachusetts.
To the north, across the Upper Inlet, something has changed today. The pale green hillside is splashed with foamy white. I step outdoors to have a look. In searching for the hedge that “forms the limit of the Negro Garden,” I hadn’t previously paid much attention to some of the understory trees growing in the scrubby woodland on the other side of the land bridge—trees I could easily have identified, given my horticultural knowledge. Too tall for a hedge—about twenty-five feet in height—they are struggling and unhealthy: their papery-smooth bark is scarred, scabbed, pocked with borer holes, and many of the multistemmed trunks are decaying or rotten. They look like they need more sun. My eye moves upward. Today the canopies are blazing white with flowers, hawthorn flowers. Competition from taller succession-forest trees—black locusts and wild cherries—has forced this “hedge,” if that is what I’m really looking at, to lift itself up into the air to find light. The line of trunks has been scattered and broadened by seedlings that sprouted from the pips of blackberries the birds ate and deposited in their droppings. I now remember tall treelike hawthorns in Wiltshire, in England. No longer useful as hedges, they mark the ghost edges of ancient pastures thrown together long ago to make bigger ones. They carry the same blaze of flowers in May, and have the same bittersweet, foxy perfume.