Perhaps if I had not already spent more than a couple of weeks being so down in the dumps, if talk about the expected duration of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggested a time frame other than the interminable, if images from my trip to New Orleans were not so powerfully present to me, then maybe the NPR report would have floated past me that morning. But something about hearing that Africans are buried beneath a public street in a small, coastal New England town gave me a new context to reconsider what is obvious and how one might learn to live with it. I knew I had to go there to see the people, even if they were still tucked in tight, if I was ever going to start letting go of the expectation that I could someday feel less lonely in America.
The first time I drove the two hours north from Providence to Portsmouth I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. It was a Sunday in late February, the day after a large snowfall had dumped about six inches of snow along New England’s southern coast. By morning, the roads were no longer wet and the snow drifts at the side of the road glowed while ghostly wisps of fine powder swirled in the winnows of eighteen-wheelers trying to close the distance by Monday. From the interstate, I saw a sign for the Strawbery Banke Museum, which had been mentioned in the radio report, and I followed its direction.
The museum turned out to be a neighborhood of restored colonial houses at the edge of the Piscataqua River. The main entrance was closed, so I followed an elderly white couple into Stoodley’s Tavern, which served as the museum ticket office on weekends. An older white woman with silver bobbed hair sat at a table covered with pamphlets advertising local tourist attractions. Are you here for the tour? she asked. I nodded yes. Ten dollars. Charles, our docent, chatted about the weather with the five of us who waited for the tour to begin: me, the senior couple who were from Kittery, Maine, and a very young, blond couple just recently moved to Vermont from Tahoe, Nevada.
We walked across the street into the original settlement founded in 1630, known as Puddle Dock. The Old Mainer wanted to know: Where were the borders of the marsh before the houses were built? Where had the water been pushed back to? He was wearing a cap that said USS Indianapolis. Charles asked him if he was on the ship during WWII and he said yes. Charles said, Were you on it when it went down? The Old Mainer told us that he had gone ashore at Pearl Harbor just before the ship had set sail for Guam. Charles enthusiastically told us the story of how the ship went down, as if its history illuminated an unseen aspect of the tour. On July 30, 1945, the ship, en route from Guam to the Gulf of Leyte, was torpedoed by the Japanese. More than nine hundred sailors were hurled into cold, choppy water. Although they radioed US forces for help as they went down, no one came for four days. By August 8, at the end of the rescue effort, only 317 men of the 1,196 originally on board had survived. The rest had been picked off by sharks or drowned.
After looking through a few of the houses in Puddle Dock, the Old Mainer, his wife, and I fell behind the guide and the young couple, who kept bragging about the beehive stove in an eighteenth-century farmhouse they were thinking of buying and restoring. They asked questions about the interior design of every home we toured. I took copious notes on Portsmouth’s history and in this, felt my dour mood lightening. Details were comforting. Charles told us that Portsmouth was an Anglican, not Puritan, settlement and that amongst its original inhabitants were seventy-two Africans and eight Danes. Many of the wealthiest families in town made their fortunes in “the trade” first by shipping food, lumber, livestock, and other goods to British colonies in the West Indies and then by carrying captured Africans to the Caribbean, Virginia, and Portsmouth from the late seventeenth century through much of the eighteenth. Throughout the tour Charles occasionally used the word “servant” but never the word “slave.”
In an alcove at the top of a staircase in a house built in 1790, the Old Mainer said to me, I’d never live in one of these old houses. They’re too cold. There were two pictures on the mantel over the fireplace in the dining room. One called Emblem of Africa featured a black man walking with a feathered headdress next to a tiger in the background. The other picture, Emblem of Europe, featured a white woman with a globe at her feet holding a book and a horn of plenty filled with fruit and flowers at the crook of her arm.
When the young couple asked about role of the Native population in the development of Portsmouth, Charles explained that they were not a factor: Most died out before the town became sizable, after catching diseases from their contact with the Europeans, he said.
At the end of the tour, I returned to Stoodley’s Tavern to ask for directions to the slave graves mentioned in the radio report. Charles told me, You can’t see anything. There’s nothing there. I thought he meant that the site had not been commemorated or officially rededicated, but his reaction made me wonder if there was even a historical marker indicating the graveyard’s boundaries. The woman who had sold me a ticket said, They’ve been re-interred. I told them I still planned to go and asked if Chestnut Street was close, since Portsmouth’s downtown area is quite small. Or should I drive? I said. She responded tersely, It doesn’t matter. It’s just an intersection.
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It was sharply cold and the wind was picking up when I arrived at Chestnut Street near the corner of Court. Several restored colonials now serving as lawyers’ and doctors’ offices lined the south side. On the north side there was a beauty salon and a sign indicating a “Drug Free School Zone.” Other than these buildings, it seemed that there was nothing to see. As I rounded the corner at Chestnut and State, I noticed a brass plaque affixed to the clapboards of a house: In colonial Portsmouth, segregation applied in death as in life. City officials approved a plan in 1705 that set aside this city block for a “Negro Burial Ground.” It was close to town but pushed to what was then its outer edge. By 1813, houses were built over the site. I got back in my car to write notes about what I found. This is when I realized my car was probably sitting on top of people. I knew I should feel something about that, but all I felt was a familiar loneliness creeping in on me.
The trip to Portsmouth had not elicited much outrage in me, even after I discovered that one of the oldest known gravesites of blacks in New England was neither green nor sacred space. I accepted the reality that the historic colonial houses—now the business residences of attorneys, hairstylists, insurance agents, and doctors—were considered by most people to be more valuable than the bodies down below them. But while I had thought that my lack of feelings while standing on people would allow me to forget that I had been standing on people, it didn’t. I had no intuition about how these dead Africans might have felt about being paved over, no feelings of ancestral connection to those buried below, and I heard no discernible voices calling to me from the depths of that darkness. I wondered if the woman at the museum had been right. Maybe the corner was just an intersection.
The ambivalence the folks at the Strawbery Banke Museum expressed for those buried beneath Portsmouth’s downtown was all the more surprising when I later learned that the first bodies exhumed from the African Burying Ground had been housed at the museum before they were transported to the temporary laboratory. I assumed that my own lack of feeling was due, in part, to the randomness with which I had selected Portsmouth as the place to try to make sense of the remains of slavery in America. I had no personal connection to New Hampshire, no familial bond to any of the people buried there, and I became certain that was the reason I couldn’t feel anything while standing on those Africans. I thought maybe I needed to visit a slave gravesite more closely related to my life if I was going to experience some true cathexis.
So once back in Rhode Island, I went to a talk given by Theresa Guzmán Stokes at Newport’s Redwood Library about that city’s largest African burial ground, called God’s Little Acre, a gravesite founded in 1747. For more than twenty years, without city support, she had been maintaining its grounds out