An American Quilt by Rachel May

Author:Rachel May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

The wooden crosses that once marked the graves have disintegrated, and all we know now is that the people who are buried there are of African American descent, and that they are the people responsible for “help[ing] to build the historic structures that have enhanced the fabric of the island.” Fort Moultrie, which was used in the defense of the city many times over the years, including during the Civil War, is just one example of the places people buried here helped to create. They were “Carpenters, Cooks, Oystermen, Laundresses, Nursemaids, House Keepers, Midwives, Soldiers, and Seamen.” I imagine a man heading toward the marshes and inlets around this island to gather oysters at low tide, a rake over one shoulder and a bucket in his other hand. I think about the ingenuity and the labor of people who helped build this country’s wealth—John Camino, Newport Gardner, Arthur Flagg, Dinah—and the historians and activists I meet today who make sure their stories are remembered and heard, the people who make these markers to commemorate, to educate the public, to direct the stories of these places.

There’s no such thing as “nice” slavery, no such thing as the “kinder” slavery of the North, no “genteel” slave owners. That myth, that northern slavery wasn’t as bad as southern slavery, that some slave owners were kinder than others, persists. Who is retelling it? What did I learn in school? I only remember watching Roots in seventh grade, nothing about the history of New England slavery. No one ever told me that living alongside the transcendentalists in Concord, Massachusetts, were the descendants of enslaved people who settled in the 1830s, establishing communities of free people of color; I did not know that they had helped to build and sustain that town, the site of the “shot heard ’round the world,” the American Revolution, cradle of liberty. Every year, when “Paul Revere” rode through our bucolic central square at midnight hollering, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” his horse’s hooves clacking over pavement as we sat on the porch of the Colonial Inn to watch, someone should also have been proclaiming the other side of the story, the contradictions inherent in proclaiming a nation’s liberty when people were enslaved here; this part of the story, the story of the people who worked to build this nation while they were owned and before they were given full citizenship, is now illuminated by the installation of the Robbins House—named for the Robbins family, free people of color who lived in Concord in the 1830s—at the site of the Old North Bridge, and told in the book Black Walden, by Elise Lemire.

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