Adam Clayton Powell IV, a member of the New York City Council, stood at the microphone and told the U.S. government: “You do not disturb the deceased. You leave our people alone. You let them rest in peace. And if these reasonable and just demands are not met, then, at the very least, we should do everything that we can to stop the construction of the building.”
The Reverend Dr. Herbert Daughtry reminded the nation that, “had it not been for the bodies and the bone, the body and the labor, of those people who rest yonder—our ancestors—there would not have been a United States of America. There would not have been any wealth in the Western world. And not only that, after we had worked the fields and built the roads, and had our bodies sold, we went out and died for the country.”
I was particularly stirred by the proclamation of city council member Helen Marshall: “We were the slaves, and our magnificence is in our survival. What is in that burial ground will teach us immensely.” Mandy and her enslaved descendants had survived, and someday soon, I would return to Montpelier and find her grave. She had much to teach me.
Newspapers and television newscasts throughout the world reported the night vigils, the organized rallies, the spontaneous demonstrations, and the petitions and meetings. Many of the country’s black citizens were enraged that their government would construct a building on top of their ancestors’ final resting place. Their people had been devalued and enslaved in a nation founded on the claim that “all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Spiritual leaders of many faiths came to the sacred site, and the cause became a cry for human rights worldwide.
One year after the discovery, in October 1992, Congress passed a law to alter the planned building’s design in order to preserve the archaeological site. The legislative body then appropriated three million dollars for a museum and research center. That year, the African Burial Ground was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in April 1993, it became a National Historic Landmark. The graveyard is the largest American colonial cemetery for enslaved Africans and perhaps the earliest and largest cemetery for any ethnic group.
Yielding to unrelenting protests from an alliance of scholars, politicians, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and the Descendant Community, the House Subcommittee on Public Works agreed to transfer the 419 exhumed skeletons to Howard University in Washington, DC. Under the direction of Dr. Michael Blakey, an African-American physical anthropologist, the bones were separated, labeled, cataloged, and packed. In a nighttime ceremony at the burial site, with hundreds of participants and onlookers, Dr. Blakey, in traditional formal African attire, accepted a small box wrapped in African fabric that contained the last of the remains to be transferred.
At Howard University’s Montague Cobb Biological Anthropology Laboratory, Dr. Blakey and his team analyzed the remains and learned the nature and extent of the brutality suffered by the black men, women, and children who had come to New York from Angola, the Congo, and the Caribbean. The researchers studied the bones, teeth, and hair of the buried individuals and discovered that almost half were children under twelve years old and that more than half of these had not reached their second birthday. The children, like the adults, had suffered from malnutrition, injury, infectious diseases, lead poisoning, and overwork.
But the slaves had buried their loved ones in accordance with centuries-old African traditions and beliefs. Wrapped in winding sheets secured with shroud pins, laid supine in individual coffins, and buried with the head at the west end of the grave, the deceased could now achieve the status of ancestor.
Some skulls had coins in the eye sockets. Among the bones lay many artifacts, including buttons, bracelets, cufflinks, and lots of beads. The dead had been laid to rest as human beings.
A boy under the age of five lay with a clamshell above his left collarbone. Perhaps this child had loved the ocean. In another coffin, a woman lay with her newborn infant nestled in the bend of her elbow. When I saw a photograph of their skeletons, I imagined the dying mother struggling to nurse her dying child, and I could feel the love and pain surrounding them as they lost their battle against death.
During my first visit to Montpelier, I’d forfeited the chance to visit the slave cemetery. Now, learning about the burial practices of New York City’s enslaved people, I resolved to return to Virginia.
18
The Plantation’s Tale
In April 1997, five years after my first visit to Montpelier, I returned to find Mandy’s final resting place, the end of her journey through the earthly world. I stopped off in the town of Orange, strolled the gently sloping side streets, and enjoyed the charm of small colonial houses. Most of the homes in the town of some four thousand residents were white clapboard with black mullions and doors. Many had window boxes or hanging baskets newly planted with colorful arrays of spring flowers. The limbs of budding oaks draped over sidewalks and lawns.
I drove past the county courthouse, built in 1859, and stopped at the Orange County Historical Society to see Ann Miller. I found her sitting at a large oak table in the center of a stuffy room lined with bookshelves.
“Good to see you again,” Ann said the moment she looked up. “It’s been way too long.”
“I’ve been traveling—Portugal, Ghana, Maryland, New York, Texas.”
“And back to Virginia.”
“Yes. I didn’t quite finish what I started five years back.”
“Well, I’ve been right here, doing a little research consultation for the historical society and working full-time for the Virginia Transportation Research Council, better known as VTRC. I try to keep busy, but I miss T.O. He died a few months ago,” Ann said. “Natural causes.”
“I’m sorry to hear about T.O. He reminded me of my grandfather, and as I was leaving, he gave me a hug. I regret that I couldn’t come back for his ninetieth birthday party.”
“It was quite a celebration. He invited everyone he knew and everyone he met,” Ann said. “We all miss him. He was a great guy, and he and his fascinating personal story helped keep Orange County history alive.”
“That trunk he found makes it so tangible.”
“His family is looking for a place to display it—maybe a museum in DC.”
“I parked across the street, right in front of the James Madison Museum. What’s in there?” I asked.
“Let’s walk over.”
“Welcome,” the silver-haired, bespectacled receptionist said, reaching across the counter to shake my hand. “Walk around, and take your time. You don’t want to miss anything.”
“Start with the door at the back,” Ann suggested. “Open it. You’re in for a surprise.”
Ann returned to the historical society, and I walked to the rear of the museum and opened a wooden door. Suddenly, I was a time traveler who had landed on a platform overlooking a cavernous room. A full-size, two-story house stood below me. I descended the steps leading to the floor of the Hall of Transportation and Agriculture.
According to a sign in front of the dwelling, the sixteen-cubic-foot “cube house” was big by the standards of the time. A family of eight, or even more, would have considered themselves quite comfortable there. The Arjalon Price House, built circa 1733, had one room with a fireplace on the first floor and a narrow winding stairway leading to the one room on the second floor. There was no kitchen or bathroom in the house. The women prepared food in a separate building; during the eighteenth century, bathing was not a common practice, and in most households, chamber pots were the only toilet facilities.
Several aging wood and leather horse-drawn carriages stood around the cube house. Massive plows and crude hand-carved tools were scattered across the floor of the huge, barn-like room. These vestiges of a bygone era looked more prehistoric than preindustrial to me, their use time- and labor-intensive. I imagined mules and slaves forcing the plows through Virginia’s red soil, leaving rows of furrows and mo
unds in their wake.
After nearly an hour looking at the relics on the floor of the vast hall, I ascended the stairs back to the main section of the museum and wandered the tight, low-ceilinged rooms. Framed documents and photographs of nineteenth-century Orange County citizens and Civil War battalions lined the walls. Artifacts once belonging to James and Dolley Madison—china, crystal, silverware, lace collars, and books—were displayed in glass cases, unlike the treasured photographs, letters, and documents in the box my mother had brought for me to hold in my hands, learn from, and pass on. I could not touch James and Dolley’s items, but they, too, were among my family heirlooms.
I was about to leave the museum when a notice captured my attention:
To be Sold, on Tuesday the 15th of May, at Orange Court-House
EIGHTY likely Virginia born SLAVES
Consisting of Men, Women, and Children, among whom are a great variety of likely young wenches and fellows, for ready money, bills of Exchange, or good merchant notes, payable at the next Court of Oyer. There are sundry carpenters, a good blacksmith, and a master collier. A satisfactory title will be made, and the public may depend the above number (at least) will be produced and sold, let the weather happen as it will, by Joseph Hawkins
I felt the same tightness in my chest I’d experienced on my first visit to Montpelier. I could not comprehend how the skill and talent of “carpenters, a good blacksmith, and a master collier” had been valued without any consideration of the humanity of the men who had these abilities. The tightness became a crushing ache, and my hands quivered as I took in the fact that children had, “for ready money,” been “produced and sold.” Some of the “likely young wenches” may have been prepubescent, unaware of or, for some, fearful of the risks inherent in their impending black womanhood.
There was no date on the notice, but the words likely Virginia born slaves told me that Mandy had not been among the eighty. Yet while envisioning her alone and scared, waiting to be called, I began to imagine myself standing on the auction block, naked except for the stained white cloth around my hips, the bids deciding my worth.
I hurried out of the museum to my car and sat for several minutes, taking slow, deep breaths, before I started the engine. Finally, when I could breathe more comfortably and my hands shook less, I eased the car away from the curb and headed toward Montpelier. Along the way, I stopped from time to time to calm myself in the peacefulness of picturesque farms, neat cottages, and a dense pine forest whose tree branches formed ornate patterns of shadow and light that flickered across the road. At the end of the thirty-minute journey, feeling grounded in the twentieth century once more, I found a shady spot to park near the visitors’ center, then took the shuttle bus up to the Madison plantation. Once again, I felt I belonged there, as if I had come home.
The president’s family had a long history in the area. In the spring of 1732, Madison’s grandparents Ambrose and Frances brought their son and two daughters to Orange County, a region of lush, rolling countryside thirty miles southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ambrose had sent his slaves ahead to clear the land for a tobacco plantation. Mount Pleasant included a two-room house, a freestanding cookhouse, barns, storage huts, and slave quarters.
Within a few months of the move, Ambrose was dead—poisoned, it was said, by Pompey, a slave from a neighboring plantation, assisted by Dido and Turk, two of Ambrose’s own slaves. This was the first documented murder of a master by slaves in Virginia. Presumably Dido, a woman, and Turk, a man, agreed to help Pompey because they were upset with how Ambrose treated them, and it is likely that the “cure” for their mistreatment was a centuries-old West African potion.
Killing a master was an act of treason, punishable by death. The accused proclaimed their innocence, but the court found them guilty. Pompey was sentenced to death by hanging. Dido’s and Turk’s only punishment was twenty-nine lashes each, in part because Ambrose’s widow, Frances, needed able hands to help farm the approximately five thousand acres now in her charge.
Twelve years later, at the age of twenty-one, James, Frances and Ambrose’s son, took over the property and bought more land. Despite having received little formal education, James Madison became a successful businessman and “gentleman farmer.”
The year 1749 witnessed the union of two prominent, well-established Virginian families: the Madisons and the Conways. James turned twenty-six that year. His bride, Nelly, was seventeen. In 1751, Nelly gave birth to James Jr., the first of the illustrious couple’s twelve offspring, only seven of whom would survive to adulthood.
James Madison Sr.
In the mid-1760s, James Sr. built a new house near Mount Pleasant. As he obtained more land, money, prestige, and power, he also acquired some one hundred slaves. And the personal papers of George Fraser (the original holder of Sarah Madden’s indenture) reveal that Fraser, Madison, and other area merchants had formed a partnership to buy and sell slaves locally and regionally. This business arrangement was referred to as “the Negro Concern.”
The family’s size and prestige grew, and the house that James Sr. started was enlarged again and again to accommodate grander and grander needs and desires, symbolized by the four towering columns that now adorn the sweeping front portico, added by James Jr. and his wife, Dolley, in the late 1790s.
At the time of my visit, the home, once a stately testimonial to the wealth generated from the thousands of fertile acres that had surrounded it, was now a memorial to an American president, to his ambitious family, to the slaves who built it, and to the southern way of life that was destroyed by the Civil War but never forgotten.
During most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Virginia’s wealth came from tobacco. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, tobacco prices fluctuated rapidly and wildly. To secure financial stability, James Madison Sr. ventured into ironworks, building contracting, and distilling his renowned peach brandy. He also diversified Montpelier’s crops to include hemp fiber and wheat.
Three decades after Madison Sr.’s death, in 1801, a general depression of tobacco prices set in and lasted throughout the 1830s. Within a few years of Madison Jr.’s death, in 1836, prices had reached bottom. Dolley had no reliable source of income, and her son, Todd, had squandered much of what remained of the Madison fortune. In 1844, to ease her strained finances, Dolley sold the plantation.
Over the years, a series of owners removed walls, altered windows and doors, and installed plumbing and electricity. At the turn of the twentieth century, members of the duPont family, the chemical-products dynasty, purchased Montpelier. They used the plantation to raise and show horses, adding stables and racetracks around the main house. The duPonts also added a second story to the Madisons’ one-story wings and converted a large room in the house into a showcase for their trophies and photographs of horses, riders, and trainers.
In 1983, Marion duPont Scott died; she left the mansion and its twenty-seven hundred remaining acres to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Inside the mansion and behind the coral-colored stucco that covered the original red-brick façade, architects and historians probed for secrets. Like the slaves who had built it, the house had endured the ambitions of owners, its value to American history often obscured. Among bricks, behind plaster, amid tobacco roots, buried under manicured lawns, and in unmarked graves were the stories of Montpelier’s enslaved people.
The resident archaeologist Lynne Lewis was at an excavation site on the former plantation when I arrived, so I waited for her on the front portico. Though the April weather in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains had been erratic, on the day of my return, the sky was clear and blue, and the sun was just beginning to warm the morning air. The distant, densely forested mountains that spread out before me were blue, almost purple, and so wide they wrapped around the horizon. Spring here, I thought, was alluring with its promise of warmth and sense of awakening. Summer, with broad fields scattered with a colorful collage of wildflowers stretchi
ng from the mansion toward the hills, had not yet arrived, but already I imagined autumn’s soaring trees ablaze with red, orange, and gold leaves. I foresaw rolling outlines of silver-white winter snow rising gently along hillsides toward the sky’s changing hue. Beyond the crest, snow glided down the slopes into the black lace of naked dormant trees. More than two centuries earlier, Mandy, Coreen, and Jim had witnessed the seasonal drama here.
Despite its ever-changing beauty, Montpelier had been a prison. The landscape around the mansion was sweeping and open, but I felt the confinement of the plantation’s antebellum years. Once, scores of slave cabins lay south of the mansion, and I pictured them scattered low on the hillside, leaning perilously, their weathered roofs slowly giving way to the pull of the dusty earth. The sinking roofs mimicked the bowing hills, all succumbing to the forces of the land. Meanwhile, slaves, diminutive in the distant fields, toiled, their labor coaxing riches from the soil, making possible the Madison legacy.
I went to the back of the mansion, hoping to step again into the furrow where Coreen had walked, where, together, she and I followed a visible, dusty red path into landscape that had held black people hostage to ambition and greed. The path was gone. A brick walkway now covered Coreen’s footsteps, burying my physical connection to my enslaved ancestor. I felt alone and unmoored.
Lynne found me wandering aimlessly. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said.
“No problem,” I murmured. I did not mention Coreen’s buried footsteps.
Silently, we headed toward the slave cemetery. Scattered pebbles on the dirt road glistened in the morning sunlight, and wide meadows speckled with young daffodils sloped green and bold. But as Lynne and I walked the thirteen hundred feet from the mansion, I grew more and more afraid I would see an isolated patch of dry soil with clusters of poison ivy and dandelions, a place where in death, as in life, slaves had been dishonored. Bursts of wind made the trees shudder. I huddled into my jacket.
The Other Madisons Page 17