by Rachel May
“Bees still come to eat the sugar from the floor of this bath when it rains,” Gonzalo says. It sounds incredible, but one hundred years of sugar water still saturates the earth.
“When we look at the bath-shaped hole in the dam above,” Gonzalo says, “we don’t know exactly what that is, but we imagine that this is where the owner of the plantation took his bath, with a bottle of rum and a black woman, looking out over his plantation and all the enslaved people working. It’s just a theory,” says Gonzalo, like the big bang. He laughs. “But it’s the most accepted theory.”
I imagine the owner in this bath in 1835, seven years after buying the plantation. He bought this land at the same time Winthrop and Hilton were gaining their footing in Charleston, the year Susan knew she was pregnant with her first baby, the year Eliza, Minerva, and Juba were claimed by Hasell to live with him and Susan on Cumberland Street. In 1835, at San Isidro, the owner might have sat triumphant in his bath with a woman who was forced to lie beside him, while in Columbia, South Carolina, Winthrop wrote to Eliza Williams back home, settling into his indoctrination in the cotton industry of South Carolina. He was about to become a rich factor who brought bales of cotton from the plantations outside of Charleston to ship to the New England (and, sometimes, Liverpool) textile mills. I think of his father and grandfather trading in the West Indies in the early 1800s—the repetition of their words in the quilt’s papers—think of his father’s store and the mercantile connections that gave him ease of access to so many goods traded in the Atlantic waters that I see from the Manaca Iznaga tower later in the afternoon with Gonzalo.
“He must have been a jerk,” I say of the owner in the bathtub. I ask Gonzalo whether “mulatto” women were often chosen as mistresses by white owners here as in the States, and does he know the term rape?
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I’m sure, like all the owners of the sugar industry, this man was a jerk.”
We walk through the crunch of dirt and over excavated rocks to the slave quarters on the other side of the Jamaican train. The quarters are in the woods facing the big house, but the trees aren’t very tall. This must have been cleared land in the 1830s, where the owners could oversee the enslaved people without the shade of trees.
“He was a jerk like most people who have a lot of money,” Gonzalo adds.
What an ingenious bug, to kill the spider that will support all of its young until they become wasps themselves. It looks like deviance, what the bug does, pillaging the tarantula’s belly, but it’s a cunning way to perpetuate the species, isn’t it? Can anything adaptive in the animal world be deemed deviant?
I mistake the wasp for a metaphor. What became adaptive for some humans, this exertion of power of one group over another, this racialized world they created, that is deviant. We have access to morals and ethics. We can’t kill and profit without consequences. If those wise enough to point out the wrongs of the present—the people Winthrop admonished for distributing abolitionist pamphlets—aren’t heeded, then we can rely on our descendants to try to correct for the future. Can’t we?
I think of the building collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, where 1,134 people were killed and 2,500 more were injured. You probably saw the pictures of the concrete building, destroyed in the middle, a wreck of four stories piled one on top of the other. This was a building owned by a man who was warned of the possibility of collapse; the people who worked on the first two floors, in shops, were told not to come to work the next day, but the factory workers who made clothes whose brands you probably recognize (Walmart, Benetton, Mango, among others), they were told to come to work; they worked on the top two floors, which were never meant to be used for the heavy equipment a factory required. Most of them were women who needed their jobs to support their families. How could they say no when they were told to come to work that day?
Industrialization led us there, to the textile factories, to the poor working conditions, to the pollution of lands surrounding the mills with dyes and fixatives and cleaning agents, to the lands, in India and elsewhere, where cotton is grown, still, sometimes by enslaved people and almost always by people who have suffered at the cruel processes capitalism mandates: high yields, for example, require farmers in India to use a cotton seed that’s been genetically modified to resist the boll weevil, which ended the production of Sea Island cotton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But, like every creature, the boll weevil has adapted, and can still feed on that genetically modified seed. The farmers have to use more pesticides to kill the boll weevil. In 2005, five hundred farmers died from pesticide exposure; their only form of protection as they sprayed was “a piece of cloth covering nose and mouth,” if any was used at all.
More rain is required to nurture that seed. Farmers are in debt from having to buy that seed, and many of them have killed themselves when their crops have failed, unable to fathom how they’ll overcome the debt.
In 2014, India “produced forty million bales” of cotton. This was a “bumper year,” which made for a surplus, and farmers weren’t paid enough for what they grew. There was no way to pay the debt. Since the mid-1990s, 300,000 cotton farmers have died by suicide.
A woman’s hand embroidery in Trinidad and a line of cloths for sale in front of a plantation. Women learn the art and sell goods to support themselves and their families.
I think of the people who produced the cotton that Winthrop thought would fund his retirement. I think of Eliza, Minerva, and Juba, and Boston and Bishroom, and William and Jane and George. I think of the women in the building collapse in Bangladesh, knowing that the conditions under which they lived and continue to live are fueled by capitalism, too. I look down to see what I’m wearing, who made it, and what it’s made of, I look at the piles of fabric I’ve bought for quilting, and the stacks of pretty threads whose colors I love, and it’s as if I hear the screech of brakes in my mind; I cannot buy these anymore. I think about the resistance to fast fashion—but, I read, conscientious buying is not enough. One person’s pocketbook will not change this system. A friend says that the women working in those mills abroad need those jobs, and boycotting those brands means they could lose work that supports their families. I keep circling: What will change it?
In the main house, one of the men is still mixing concrete by hand in a wheelbarrow. They’re restoring this house with all the traditional materials, making it historically accurate. The man points us to a corner where some artifacts have been found; it looks like a pile of junk from afar—broken bricks and vases, dirty screens with pebbles stuck in the grids. The engineer we met on the grounds, the man overseeing this project, tells us that the most important place for archaeologists to search is the “bathroom,” as it’s translated to me—the privy or outhouse—because that’s where people threw away all their trash that we study today—broken pottery, discarded utensils, china plates, and chipped cups.
The men tell us they’ve just found the well—maybe it used to serve as the toilet—where they uncovered two guns. Gonzalo picks them up. They’re Winchesters, he believes, based on the shape of the barrels. The metal is rusted and decaying, the barrel now fragile with age. The men tell us they also found this, says Gonzalo, translating for me. He gestures farther into the corner, where there’s a stack of bricks.
“This is our lucky day,” he says. “Oh, we’re making history today!”
We stand in the corner where the sun comes through the open archway to my left. It falls on the red bricks stacked together. One of the bricks lies on its back, rough side down, and there, scrawled on its surface are letters. Gonzalo picks up the brick: Canuto Matanew.
Gonzalo lifts the brick and holds it in one hand. There are notches in the brick’s side where four fingers must have rested.
“Put your hand here,” I say. Fingerprints. A perfect fit.
Fingerprints, a name. Symbols of identity.
When I go home, I research and think at first this is Tagalog, a language from the Philippines. Filipin
os came from their homeland to this similarly Spanish territory to work on tobacco plantations to the west of Havana, in Pinar del Río Province, once called New Philippines. But then I write to a scholar, Manuel Barcia, who tells me that someone who could write his name was probably not enslaved. He’d have been a local, most likely, he says, perhaps a plantation worker, an overseer. He was most certainly a Spanish speaker, so if an immigrant, he’d have come to the country as a child and acquired the language young, or as an adult from Spain. We don’t know when the brick was made, Dr. Barcia reminds me; we can’t come to any conclusions without more information.
I try to imagine the man named Canuto, the hot days he must have spent hunched over the fire where bricks were made, or standing at a pile of red clay, shaping the earth into rectangles. He’d have paused, that day, and picked up a stick or a piece of metal, and scrawled his name into the brick, his fingers pressed on its side as he held it steady. And then it went into the fire.
The brick will remain a mystery to me; I’ll leave, my trip over, and Gonzalo and the historic commission will go on restoring this place, finding clues to the people who worked here, piecing them together, telling the story. This restoration has been ongoing for fifteen years, and it may take fifteen more to complete.
“That seventy years have rolled away, since she on the banks of the Rio de Valta received her existence—the mountains Covered with spicy forests, the valleys loaded with the richest fruits, spontaneously produced; joined to that happy temperature of air to exclude excess; would have yielded her the most compleat felicity, had not her mind received early impressions of the cruelty of men, whose faces were like the moon, and whose Bows and Arrows were like the thunder and the lightning of the Clouds.”
—Belinda Sutton, from the petition for her freedom, 1783
Belinda Sutton stands before the house where she was enslaved by Isaac Royall. She wears a red cape and a brown dress. She takes off the cape before she begins speaking. It’s warm this evening, in the seventies, too warm, even, for the bell-sleeved dress she’s wearing. She’d have to have worn a long-sleeved dress no matter the weather. It’s of brown and white calico, vertical stripes, with a corseted top that tapers towards her belly, and a long, gathered skirt. I think about the moments it would take to dress herself in the dark morning before the masters rose, the quiet of the house versus the clamor in the cooler slave quarters, where there are no thick blankets and fine silk curtains, no stacks of clothes from which to choose, no oil paintings on the walls, no carved mahogany desks and chairs on which to sit.
The slave quarters at the Royall House
The slave quarters are spare, with bare wide-planked floors and roughly carved chairs that don’t hide their origins from trees—here a knot, here a set of asymmetrical legs—as many comforts as the enslaved people could afford to add, with innovation. Those hand-carved chairs, for example, and maybe a soft pillow for a child, made of flannel from the white family’s last new batch of clothes, stitched with care by the child’s mother. Likely, the fire always roars hot. This is where the cooking for the master’s family is done. In wintertime Massachusetts, families must have nestled together close to the great hearth, trading places each night to give everyone a share of the heat.
The house where the Royall family lived, beside the slave quarters.
This is the house owned by Isaac Royall, founder of the Harvard Law School. In the 1700s, he owned a sugar plantation in the West Indies (Antigua) and lived in Massachusetts. He traded not only sugar but also enslaved people, and is another of those merchants whose lives and livelihoods zigzagged the colonial U.S. coast, including New England, and the West Indies, the Atlantic world.
In the house that’s been restored to display fineries from the period in which the Royalls thrived, the house that stands beside the slave quarters where Belinda would have lived, there’s a painting of the family, their hair curled up above their glossy finery, eager to document their wealth. Their hair was probably curled, in preparation for that portrait, by the enslaved people they owned, house “servants” who would have held the iron curler carefully so as not to burn themselves or their masters, tenderly twirling each strand of hair around the iron, then holding it tight, until a series of perfect spirals fell from the girls’ heads. I imagine what a woman might have been thinking as she held a hot iron rod in her hands over her mistress’s head, day after day.
In a room off the main hall, to the right, there’s a room with a hearth and a cot where an enslaved woman slept and worked. Above the hearth shine hanging copper pots and pans, and perched on stands over the logs are cast-iron pots waiting to boil water, stews, and soups. This is where Belinda might have worked, hauling water in from the well, boiling potatoes or vegetables picked by the people who were enslaved to work in Royall’s fields and gardens, on his five-hundred-acre farm.
At night, and in quiet moments between work, maybe Belinda or her children played with the beads and marbles and china shards that have since been found in the archaeological digs around the slave quarters. As historians documenting the site explain: “Finding evidence of ‘games’ and leisure in the archaeological record is more than quaint. In recreation, we see an active reassertion of humanity within the worst of dehumanizing conditions. The prevalence of such evidence on slavery sites across the country attests to its importance, as do the often creative ways enslaved people created and possessed these items.” Games were empowerment, personhood, resistance.
With china shards—fragments of dishes broken by the family they served, perhaps—of two different patterns and a crisscross pattern on cloth or scratched into the dirt, people might have played Achi, a game similar to tic-tac-toe. Get three in a row first and you’ve won; complicate the game with four pieces and variations on the rules. Now, I watch two children play in my office at school, smiling before they make a move, tongue in a corner of her mouth, a quiet hmm from him as he decides where his chip will go next, her laughing on the next move when she’s won.
Tammy Denease portrays Belinda Sutton, telling us her story. In 1783, with the help of Prince Hall, the Boston founder of the Freemasons society for African-Americans (now called Prince Hall Freemasonry), who claimed his own freedom, Belinda wrote her own story. Since she wasn’t literate, Phillis Wheatley and Prince Hall likely helped set down what she spoke. The petition to the Senate and House of Representatives doesn’t read as I’d expected—a dry legal document—but is a story told in beautiful, lyrical language, describing her life, the trauma she witnessed and experienced, and her home, which she must have missed her whole life.
Belinda’s petition, 1789, displayed at the Royall House.
She refers to herself as “Belinda the African,” proudly claiming her identity and history, and says she grew up “on the banks of the Rio de Valta” in Ghana, surrounded by those “spicy forests,” “valleys loaded with the richest fruits,” delighted with the world until she saw the Europeans with their “faces . . . like the moon, and whose Bows and Arrows were like the thunder and the lightning of the Clouds.” No longer safe “with each hand in that of a tender Parent,” and praying to “Orisa who made all things,” before she was twelve, she was kidnapped, “ravished from the bosom of her Country, from the arms of her friends.” Her parents were deemed too old “for servitude,” and she was “cruelly separated from them forever.” She was taken to “a floating world,” above “sporting Monsters of the deep,” and was surrounded by “three hundred Affricans in chains, suffering the most excruciating horrors.” She goes on to describe her arrival to the continent and the life she spent serving Isaac Royall before he died in the Revolutionary War. The irony of a battle for freedom while she had none is not lost on her, nor is the fact that she was never given any of the money Royall earned with the help of her labor—not “one morsel of that immense wealth.”
She asks, now that she’s seventy years old and “feeble,” to be granted an allowance from Royall’s estate to help sustain herself and her dau
ghter, Prine (she also had a son, Joseph, and both children were baptized). She was named as free in Isaac Royall’s will in 1778; a condition of her freedom was that she be given an annual stipend, so that she wouldn’t be a “charge” or burden, on the town of Medford. It was illegal in many states to free enslaved people because the governments feared they’d be responsible for them once their owners deemed them too old for work and requiring care. Belinda was awarded thirty pounds, for three years after Royall died, and then she began to petition for back pay. She petitioned in 1783, 1787, 1788, and 1793, winning “a year’s allowance” in 1787 and a small sum of money from one of Royall’s relatives.
She wasn’t successful in getting the money, but her petitions have marked her place in history as she persisted in asking for her due. Like Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Ellen Craft, she wrote herself into the record when others would have attempted to erase her. This—her tenacity—is probably why Tammy Denease thinks of her as bearing witness to her Ashanti heritage.
Belinda’s story was pieced together more fully in 2015, when the 1788 petition was found via a digital archive and revealed the fact that she’d been married, and was now a widow with the last name Sutton. As more digital archives are created—the runaway slave advertisements one among them—more stories might be pieced together, more threads connecting narratives of which we know parts.
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