Darkly by Leila Taylor

Author:Leila Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912248551
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2019-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

JOOST

THE FIDDLER WHO SLAYED

But the dent in that boulder isn’t really the Devil’s footprint and the location is estimated:

IN THIS GENERAL AREA

(WE THINK)

A BLACK MAN FOUGHT THE DEVIL AND WON

SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE

(BUT NOT REALLY)

They say that death is the great equalizer, but some neighborhoods in Green-Wood are better than others. The Knickerbocker set of the Golden Age are buried here in monumental mausoleums along their own Park Avenues, with crypts the size of studio apartments. How you died was a reflection of how you lived, and as in life, the residences of the poor and disenfranchised are the first to be paved over in the name of development.

In August 2017 in Green-Wood, the graves of eighty-three African Americans dating back to 1858 were discovered in a sparsely populated area, close to the street and far away from the best neighborhoods.2 If Boss Tweed and Louis Tiffany have their final residence in the Upper East Side of the cemetery, The Colored Lots, as they were known, were the slums. They were the cheapest lots, built with no foundations so that over time the headstones sank into the earth and disappeared. With no one visiting them and no one maintaining them, the names and birthdays and deaths were left to fall into oblivion.

Stories like this pop up now and then as the city tears down and builds itself up over and over again. A Black burial plot from the seventeenth century was found under the 126th Street Bus Depot in Harlem.3 An incredibly well preserved Black woman in an iron coffin was discovered in Newtown, Queens.4 The bones of slaves and servants are discovered, construction is halted, and the dead are recognized three hundred years too late.

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