The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  no dictionary of proper names: “An Alphabetical Table of the Proper Names in the Old and New Testaments” in a 1792 edition of the Bible, although a late source, offers a possibility on page 4 of the table for the choice of the name Semie or Semnie, from the Hebrew meaning “hearing” or “obedient.” Rev. John Brown, The Self-Interpreting Bible: Containing the Sacred Text of the Old and New Testaments (New York: Hodge and Campbell, 1792).

  Guyanese Indian woman: Peter. F. Campbell, Some early Barbadian History: as well as the text of a book published anonymously in 1741 entitled ‘Memoirs of the first settlement of the island of Barbados…’: and a transcription of a manuscript entitled ‘The description of Barbados’ written about the year 1677 by Major John Scott (St. Michael, Barbados: Caribbean Graphics, 1993), 146.

  sêminí or osêminí: “sêminí (sometimes osêminí) = Komantí spirits (collectively).” The plural word sêminí invokes or means a gathering of the Komantí, “the ultimate Saramake warrior and curing gods.” The word Komantí, meaning both spirits and a Saramakkan language, is derived from “Cormantine” (for the local Coromantees), the name the English gave to the Gold Coast (Ghanaian) slave fort. Richard Price, Travels with Tooy: History, Memory, and the African American Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 345, 341; Richard Price, pers. comms., July 26, 2006, June 26, 2012. Dutch records on Guyanese slavery online begin with the late eighteenth century; nineteenth-century manumission records produced five slave women by the name of Semiere, or Semmie. www.nationaalarchief.nl/vrij-in-suriname and www.surinamistiek.nl IBS (Instituut ter bevordering van de ‘Surinamistiek’).

  old “Poppy” Terry: Information from Shinnecock Becky Genia and from Elizabeth Thunder Bird Haile, tribal elder of the Shinnecock Nation, 2005.

  11. IN THE GROUND

  Her letter is dated: Cornelia Horsford to unknown, August 26, 1915, copy, SMA, NYU IV/H/1/98/9.

  burial without markers: Gaynell Stone, “Spatial and Material Aspects of Culture: Ethnicity and Ideology in Long Island Gravestones, 1670–1820” (Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1987), 146, 148. Margaret Fell Fox, George Fox’s wife, was buried without a headstone in 1702. Her last words were “I am in Peace.”

  “social death”: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

  Jerome Handler and Ira Berlin: Handler and Lange, Plantation Slavery in Barbados, 171–215, esp. 173, “The Negroes … bury one another in the ground of the plantation where they die,” wrote Barbados’s governor (Jonathan Atkins) in 1676, “and not without ceremonies of their own”; 195, “Under normal circumstances, plantation management apparently did not interfere with interment and postinterment behavior”; and 215, “‘However one may choose to define a generalized West African “heritage” shared by the slaves transported to any New World colony…’ the West African homelands clearly influenced the mortuary patterns of Barbadian slaves to a considerable degree,” Handler and Lange quoting Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, “An Anthropological approach to the Afro-American Past: a Caribbean Perspective,” ISHI Occasional Papers in Social Change 2 (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976), 5–7; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 62–63.

  sole authority: NS appealed for outside governance in 1672, to the New York court for power to arrest the island’s Indians who “have presumed in their Drink to breed Disturbance … ye occasion of great ffrights and trouble in his family.” O’Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, 14:713.

  “a preventive strategy”: Smallwood, “African Guardians,” 700.

  in New York City: The first large-scale rebellion in New York did not occur until 1712; the second, more conspiracy than revolt, was in 1741. As on Barbados, legislative response to the discovery of slave plots, rumors of rebellion, or the revolts themselves offer a way to gauge the strength of white fears and rumors against the presence of a rising number of blacks in the city. Edgar McManus writes, “Slave disturbances were so common that the streets of most towns were not safe.” Jill Lepore, “The Tightening Vise: Slavery and Freedom in British New York,” in Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 58–69, 78–87; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 119, 131–35; McManus, Black Bondage in the North, 79.

  many ways to retaliate: Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 11.

  carved monuments: Marcus, Discovering the Black Experience in Suffolk County, 117.

  the body of an infant: Description of graves 335 and 336 at the African Burial Ground, http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/sc/afb/shell.html.

  No stone confirms: No stonecutter’s receipts have been found. So it is not clear whether Cornelia commissioned the burying ground monument as indicated in her letter or whether it was carved at the same time as the Quaker monument, whose inaugural celebration took place in July 1884. Another stone with lettering similar to that of the slave burial ground monument is located near the spring on the east side of the top of Gardiners Creek. Visible only from a boat or by standing in the creek, the inscription reads “Yoko,” surely a reference to the canoe-borne life of the sachem Youghco. Another stone on the north side of a maple just a few yards from the front drive circle offers a disagreeable start: inscribed “Sambo,” the lettering commemorates a pet, who was at least honored with his name.

  The list, if it existed: The burying ground is on private property, so there was no official requirement to list the interments in the town record. Griffing may have kept his own list, if such a list was indeed maintained.

  “Planted Six rows of corn”: Samuel Smith Gardiner Daybook No. 3 “commenced September 4, 1844” 1844–1858, SMA, NYU III/A/3/45/2.

  “Negro garden”: Fields often have long-lived names, derived from use or location. Obsolete language also often continues in use: a good late example being the word “pitle,” a small lot, often irregularly shaped, a word E. N. Horsford used in writing to the manor superintendent Jesse Preston, “At present you might keep all the sheep in the pitle.” Horsford to Preston, Cambridge, October 28, 1884, SMA, NYU IV/A, 1a, 67, 44.

  “For the enabling Negroes”: Jerome Handler makes clear the distinctions between “Negro Garden” (also sometimes known as the “Negro Ground”) and the two other areas where slaves grew food for their own sustenance, the “provision ground” and the house plots that surrounded the slave village huts. Slaves sold their own produce and sometimes animals (pigs, chickens) on Barbados and Long Island, where legislation forbidding slave markets was enacted as early as 1684. Peter Thompson, “Henry Drax’s Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 66, no. 3 (July 2009): 585; Handler, “Plantation Slave Settlements,” 133–34; Handler, pers. comm., Dec. 1, 2008; Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 117.

  Indian corn, or maize: Crosby, Columbian Exchange, 185–86.

  as blanks: The erroneous idea of incoming slaves as “blanks” persisted: see Jerome S. Handler, untitled review of Sidney M. Greenfield’s 1966 English Rustics in Black Skin: A Study of Modern Family Forms in a Pre-industrialized Society (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1966), in American Anthropologist, New Ser., 71, no. 2 (April 1969), 335–37, http://jeromehandler.org/wp-content/uploads/GreenfieldReview69.pdf.

  Indian land management: Cronon, Changes in the Land, 34–53.

  habitus: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 85; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 53; Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25–84; Elizabeth Terese Newman, “San Miguel Acocotla: The History and Archaeology of a Central Mexican Hacienda” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2008), 7–8.

  callaloo: Callaloo is a general descriptive term for a number of
edible leafy greens from the amaranthus, chenopodium, and phytolacca plant families. See B. W. Higman, Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2008), 100–109, and Sidney W. Mintz, “Food Enigmas, Colonial and Postcolonial,” Gastronomica 10, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 149–54.

  cassava: Cassava, Manihot esculenta, of which one variety, the bitter cassava, yields triple the caloric value of maize, thrives in poor soils; produces a heavy crop and several harvests from one planting; is drought resistant and not eaten by herbivores, as it is poisonous until processed; and keeps well in the ground, like turnips. Grown by Amerindians and domesticated in Brazil and Central America four thousand years ago, it was imported into Africa by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Cassava cakes, by the 1680s, were a favored food in the West Indies; one writer called cassava “the common bread” of planters and servants in Jamaica. Higman, Jamaican Food, 61–64. Also see Jane G. Rubin and Ariana Donalds, eds., Bread Made from Yuca: Selected Chronicles of Indo-Antillean Cultivation and Use of Cassava 1526–2002 (New York: InterAmericas, 2003).

  “a disposition to recollect”: Oliver Sacks, “The Landscape of his Dreams,” in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 169.

  “the spring and the end of the graveyard”: Horsford, unfinished genealogical manuscript, SMA, NYU-IV-I-2-111.

  “clay colander”: Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.

  a piece of a European utensil: AFMCAR.

  “Ground-truthing”: For “ground-truthing,” see Joanne Bowen, “Historical Ecology and the British Landscape,” and R. Marley Brown III, “Pervasive Factionalism and Identity Politics in the Early English New World: Archaeological Examples from the Colonies of Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados,” both papers presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Mobile, Alabama, 2002; for how ground-truthing works at its best and can be distilled in print to reveal how archaeology can be “sensitive to questions of general cultural significance,” see Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, 44–49.

  Peter Banks: Interview with Peter Banks, professional plowman and heavy horse trainer, Herefordshire, England, Sept. 30, 2001.

  a GIS (Geographic Information System) program: pers. comm., David Landon, Oct. 18, 2012; http://blogs.umb.edu/fiskecenter/2012/07/23/geographic-information-systems.

  to “observe the landforms”: A. Wayne Cahilly and Todd Forrest, “Observation of Landforms, Hawthorns, and other Genera at Sylvester Manor,” New York Botanical Garden report, 2000, Griswold Papers, Fales Library, NYU.

  the scientists concluded: Cahilly and Forrest, “Observation of Landforms,” 8.

  Erosion patterns: The North Peninsula drops a mere twenty feet from the hill crest over the length of a generous 200 to 300 feet to reach the broad curve of the Upper Inlet shore near a spring at the western end of the inlet. “Erosion seldom occurs in forested areas, and when it does the resulting depressions are deep and narrow, more on the nature of a defile … Some of the areas eroded from the plateau [the top of the North Peninsula] to the marsh are now little more then concave linear depressions recognizable only by their descending orientation” and thus don’t display the patterns characteristic of erosion on forested land, indicating that this area has been cleared for a long time. Cahilly and Forrest, “Observation of Landforms,” 6.

  The UMass team: Hayes, “Field Excavations,” 40.

  in New York City: Lepore, “The Tightening Vise,” 60.

  slaves to New Netherland: Christopher Moore, “A World of Possibilities: Slavery and Freedom in Dutch New Amsterdam,” in Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 29–56.

  in Charleston: Lepore, “The Tightening Vise,” 60.

  Duke’s Laws: The Colonial Laws of New York, 1:18; see also Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color, 115–16; Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970), 1–22; and Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 31–36.

  Over the decades: The Duke’s Laws defined the concept of inherited slave status: the children of slave mothers were slaves for life, so manumission became the only option for slaves to become free.

  By 1698: See Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 52–59, for seventeenth-century slavery in New York Colony; also see Shillingburg and Shillingburg, “The Disposition of Slaves”: “The New York colony had more slaves than New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania combined. About 20% of the population of Suffolk County in 1698 was African and most of them were slaves.” For an extended overview of slavery on Long Island, see Moss, “Slavery on Long Island.”

  Shelter Islanders: O’Callaghan, List of Inhabitants, 51.

  half the slaves: Moss, Slavery on Long Island, 110–11.

  colossal by East End standards: Abstracts of Wills 1665–1787, Suffolk County Surrogate’s Court, Riverhead; Kenneth Scott, “Early New York Inventories of Estates,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly (NGSQ) 53 (June 1965): 133–43, and Scott, “New York Inventories, 1665–1775,” NGSQ 54 (Dec. 1966): 246–49.

  Solely to him: By paying a fine of £500 against his partners’ interests to the Dutch government in 1674, NS was thereby considered the owner of those interests under Dutch law. In both will and inventory—written under English law seven years later—listing what was owned in partnership must have been a protective legal stratagem.

  “the said Moyetie”: Will of NS.

  renounced her claim: Barck, Papers of the Lloyd Family, 1:292–94; SMA, NYU I/140/30.

  William Brenton: Brenton’s livestock herds at Point Judith in the Narragansett region were double or triple the size of the Shelter Island herds (more than 1,600 sheep to NS’s 427, and eighty horses versus forty), except for cattle, where NS’s much larger herd of two hundred against Brenton’s forty-nine may indicate an interesting difference in how they made their money, in wool or in salt meat for export. As compared to NS’s twenty-four slaves, Brenton listed only five Africans and one Indian. William Brenton will and inventory, Brenton-Mumford Manuscripts, Box 5, Newport Historical Society, cited in Romani, “The Pettaquamscut Purchase,” 60.

  larger estates: See Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680.”

  Nathaniel’s annual income: Sample trading activity records, 1654–72: NS, Shelter Island, to JWJr, March 15, 1654, mentions a ship of “300 tunnes” due to arrive soon with salt and English trade goods; NS wishes to load a “psell of staves.” MHS Proc., ser. 2, 4: 271–72; NS to JWJr from Rhode Island, July 27, 1654: “Its my hartie desire there may be a trade betwixt us.” WP, 6:412. NS to JWJr from Shelter Island, October 10, 1654, mentions cattle to be shipped from Fishers Island to Shelter Island, SMA, NYU I/A/140/3. JWJr, Hartford, to Thomas Lake, April 15, 1661, “There is a ship of 300 tunnes at Shelter Iland, fro Barbados, consigned to Capt Sylvster (its said fro ye Quakers).” MHS Colls., ser. 5, 8 (1882): 73; Darrett B. Rutman, “Governor Winthrop’s Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 20, no. 3 (July 1963): 409. In Southampton, NS sold goods to Reneck Garison and was to be paid in whale oil, through an agent, Thomas Backer of East Hampton, June 10, 1672, EHTR 1: 345–46. Caribbeanist John Pulis made the suggestion that breeding and selling slaves could have been part of the Shelter Island operation. The proposal is not out of the question, since slaves were at a premium in this early period and the practice was not unknown. See Josselyn, John Josselyn, 24, for colonist Samuel Maverick’s intention to breed Africans for use as slaves. The dollar calculation was made on December 12, 2012, using TheMoneyConverter.com.

  the income stream: On at least one occasion Grizzell assisted a child directly, her second son, Nathaniel II (1661–1705), Brinley Sylvester’s father. Contrary to usual practice regarding a jointure or pin money (see Staves, Married Women’s Property Rights, 155), she helped Nathaniel purchase a house (perhaps in East Hampton, where he lived unti
l 1700 after his marriage to Margaret Hobert of East Hampton) “out of the Rents issues and profits of my jointure.” She also gave him “some household stuffs w.ch is now in his possession.” Will of GBS; Hoff, “Sylvester Family,” 17.

  Nathaniel sold a firkin: Shelter Island Account Book 1658–1768, East Hampton Library, n.p. Side B, page 8, the earliest entry.

  Hog Neck: “Option on Horse Neck Given to Nathaniel Sylvester by John Richbell, 1664[–65],” Lloyd Papers, 1:15–16.

  the mill at Tom’s Creek: STR 1: 429–30.

  other lots: North Fork and on Block Island. Will of NS.

  land in New Jersey: Edwin Salter, History of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, New Jersey (Bayonne: F. Gardner & Son, 1890), 10–25.

  A merchant of Newport: Bridenbaugh, Fat Mutton, “Appendix III Rhode Island Merchants 1636–90,” 139.

  sixty-five acres: “the planting feeld behinde the Orchard Containeing about fourtie akers and the planting feeld called Mannanduck Containing about twentie five akers.” Will of NS, 1680.

  meadows and mowing land: Entry dated April 6, 1678, in The Second Book of Records of the Town of Southampton, Long Island, N.Y.… Including the Records from 1660 to 1717, William S. Pelletreau, transcriber and ed. (Sag Harbor, NY: John H. Hunt, Printer, 1877), 69–70.

  moldboard plow: Four plows, plowshares and collars, six yokes, and seven iron chains were inventoried for a total value of £4.14.0. Inventory of NS, 1680.

  the manor today: With the exception of tidal marsh, and a few areas labeled “Muck” on the 1978 USDA soil map, the entire 243 acres of Sylvester Manor today—which would have been considered the home grounds—consist of prime soils for agriculture, part of the “Montauk series,” mostly fine sandy or silty loams.

  “longer than a week”: Interview with Peter Banks.