Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris | Slavery in New York [catalogue for an exhibition at the New York Historical Society 2005-2006]

at the roots

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris Slavery in New York [catalogue to the two-part art show of November 2005 and 2006], with essays by Christopher Moore, Jill Lepore, Graham Russell, Gao Hodges, Patrick Rael, Shane White, Carla L. Peterson, Craig Steven Wilder, Manisha Sinha, David Quigley, Iver Bernstein, and Marcy S. Sacks (New York: The New Press, 2005)

 

In November 2005 I attended the exhibition of Slavery in New York at the New York Historical Society. The show was certainly not dazzling in terms of its presentation; the over-crowded rooms, each containing only a few objects but numerous exhibits of tapes and films, made for a kind of cacophony in the high-ceilinged, dark quarters of the Society that made it difficult even to concentrate.

     The heart of the show, however, was its information; and in that respect it was one of those fascinating shows where the catalogue may tell you as much as the actual museum experience. The extensiveness and continuance of slavery, in a city whose citizenry today are so diverse and cosmopolitan that it is often easy to forget, is at the heart of this show. Already in 1737, one in five New Yorkers was black, nearly all of those men, women and children being enslaved, meaning that outside of Charleston, South Carolina—the center of Southern slavery—New York had the largest urban population of slaves. As a Scottish visitor is quoted: “It rather hurts a Europian eye to see so many negro slaves upon the streets.”

     Slavery was seen in New York almost as an economic necessity. As a columnist of the day wrote: “…the want of hands and the Dearness of the Wages of hired Servants makes Slaves at this Time, necessary.” Even though it was cheaper for New York slave traders to import the slaves directly from Africa, most the imported slaves of New York in the early days came from the West Indies: Barbados, Antigua, Jamaica, St. Thomas, Curaçao, Bermuda, and St. Kitts. Only a very small percentage came from South Carolina.

     Clearly, the treatment of these human beings was inhumane—if for no other reason than they were forced workers with absolutely no rights. But unlike the rural slaves, who most often lived in separate quarters from the families for whom they worked, in New York slaves slept in their owners’ attics and cellars, working during the day alongside whites as servants, artisans, and laborers. Black slaves kept different hours—they arose earlier and went to bed later—than white servants, but that also allowed them time for communication throughout the city. Accordingly, slaves were the early bearers of news and, in their extensive city travels, often had a fuller outstanding of events throughout the city than the families for whom they worked. Their activities as messengers and shoppers also meant that they could gather with one another, discussing their conditions. On March 25, 1712, such a group gathered to plan a rebellion, determining to destroy the city and “murder every white person.” On April 6, 1712 a group of 25-50 individuals set fire to an outhouse in the East Ward, and when whites came to put it out, the slaves fired upon and killed them. The night ended with nine whites being killed and six wounded. The next day the militias swept the city, capturing several rebels, while others killed themselves. The white New Yorkers were convinced that had there not been a garrison the city would have been destroyed.

     Such events resulted in a series of so-called Slave Codes, consolidated in 1730 with a provision that it was illegal for more than three slaves to meet anywhere unless it was “in some servile employment for their Master or Mistress.” Even religious services were seen as dangerous events where Blacks could foment revolution. The rising number of slave baptisms and the accompanying instructions into the faith from 1712 to 1727—resulting in a kind of rudimentary education—made slave owners nervous. In 1740 and 1741 the English evangelist George Whitefield visited New York, preaching to five or six thousands of mixed whites and blacks, which resulted in a kind of hysteria among slave owners. For soon after Whitefield’s visit fires began to break out throughout the city at the rate of three or four a day. The whites quickly blamed blacks as being the arsonists and arrested more than one hundred black men and women, convicting many of them and burning thirteen Africans at the stake, hanging nineteen others, some in chains. Seventy more individuals were sold into slavery in the Caribbean and four whites, accused of being ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged. There is little evidence, it appears, that any of those killed were actually involved in setting the fires. It is no wonder that these events, taking place over several weeks, have been compared with the Salem, Massachusetts Witchcraft trials of 1692. But as Jill Lepore observes in her catalogue essay, the New York incidents were far worse; in Salem over one hundred and fifty were accused of being witches, with only nineteen people being executed (although others died in jail), while in New York nearly two-hundred conspirators ultimately were named and tried, ending in far more deaths.

       Extremist events such as these against the slaves may also explain, in part, why it took New York longer than many other parts of the nation to fully emancipate its slaves. As author Patrick Rael points out, we usually think of emancipation as being a single event, centered upon Lincoln’s document of January 1, 1863. But, in an understatement that is almost humorous, Rael observes that New York “surrendered the institution with great reluctance.” It took nearly a half century for full emancipation to take place. Although the New York State legislature passed a sweeping emancipation measure as early 1799, slavery ac-tually increased in the city of New York. As Rael writes, “Of all the major northeastern cities, it alone remained committed to forced labor.” Baltimore, for example, listed only 1,300 slaves, Philadelphia 300, while in New York 2,300 slaves lived. The Gradual Emancipation Act legally mandated the liberation of most slaves by 1827, yet New Yorkers were much slower to give it up.

        Even with the 1817 legislation that freed any African-Americans born before July 4, 1799 by the year 1827, children born to slave mothers before July of that same year could still be apprenticed to the age of twenty-one, which meant that they would remain unfreed until 1848.

     Yet as Rael also points out, the very fact that Blacks remained in slavery brought them closer together in New York, forming a community that forged other economic possibilities and self-educational projects that doomed the institution of slavery itself—the final result of which is represented, perhaps, in the Harlem Renaissance.

    With the final death of slavery, so the catalogue claims, black and white relations in the city sharply declined by the early 20th century. One wonders, however, if this show, accordingly, reveals in some part why by mid-century race relationships in general throughout New York City had so deteriorated that the vast areas of war-zones portrayed in theater works such as West Side Story (see my essay “Three Bernstein New Yorks” in My Year 2004) had become the reality. As we observe through this show, the roots were there as early as 1712.

      This exhibition also provided those who attended an opportunity to tape their reactions. Some of those tapes on display were quite revealing: a black man speaking in great praise of the show for discovering facts which he’d never known, a white woman, dressed like a card-carrying member of the D.A.R. in hat and gloves, reporting her utter astonishment and appreciation for discovering the information the show provided. Slavery in New York was, obviously, a necessary and important event.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2006

 

 

*

The second installation of the New York Historical Society show on the African-American presence in the city, was titled “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War,” focusing on the period after the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827 through the Civil War. What became even more apparent in this second show is that New York City not only was not ready to give up slavery, for social and economic reasons, but, as museum historian James Horton suggests, “The North’s denial of equal rights to black New Yorkers was a handbook or tutorial for what the South would do during the Jim Crow period.”

     When South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, New York Mayor Fernando Wood suggested that New York should do the same. Recognizing that conscription would draw away for military service many of the young working laborers who had put him in power, Wood argued for protests against conscription and the continuance of the war, reiterating what would later become a cry throughout the South even up until the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s:

 

“It is a strange perversion of the laws of self-preservation which would compel the white laborer to leave his family destitute and unprotected while he goes forth to free the negro, who, being free, will compete with him in labor. Let the laboring populations assemble peaceably in mass meetings, and express their views upon the subject….”

 

     Almost immediately, the New York City Draft Riots of July 1863 began, the first battle on the very day in which Wood’s article was published. That day a mob of over 10,000 protestors swept down the East Side, destroying telegraph lines and railroad tracks. By that afternoon mobs attempted to wrest weapons from police control at the State Armory at 2nd Avenue and 21st Street. Numerous Blacks throughout the city—in tenement houses, on the streets, and in restaurant—were attacked. Others hid from the mobs in police protection.

     Battles continued on the West Side during the second day as mobs constructed barricades along 9th Avenue in midtown. By nighttime the Union Steam Works was set afire, and Blacks throughout the city, even those in hospitals such as the Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, spent the night in terror. Looting, particularly at the Brooks Brothers clothing manufacturer on Cherry Street, was reported. By the third day, July 15, 1983, the riots had escalated into the lynchings of black citizens James Costello and Abraham Franklin on the West Side. Franklin’s murder was particularly gruesome: a crippled coachman, Franklin was lynched at 27th Street and 7th Avenue, after which his body was cut down and dragged through the streets. News reports of the day suggested that the riots had spread to other cities such as Boston, Hartford, Newark, Jersey City, Hastings, Tarrytown, and Rye. Throughout the War New York City itself was contested ground, its many industries supporting slavery despite the fact that the State provided the largest numbers of troops and the greatest amounts of arms and food for the Northern cause.

     This revelatory show, moreover, also represented the rising numbers of abolitionists and leaders, both black and white, who would help show the City a way out of its endgame—individuals from radical abolitionists such as Lewis and Arthur Tappan to forward-looking figures such as James McCune Smith, Abram S. Hewitt, Philip A. White, Sylvester A. Murphy, and Adolph G. Schmager who worked with Blacks and other immigrant groups to forge new cultural communities and opportunities for their constituencies that would heal the divisions of the City during the War.

     If nothing else, these two significant historical shows should force Northern whites to reevaluate their sometimes complacent and smug attitudes toward their Southern kin. Slavery, these shows make clear, was a national issue, not simply a regional one.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2006

Reprinted from My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)

Nivaria Tejera | The Ravine / 2008

looking down

by Douglas Messerli

Nivaria Tejera The Ravine, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008)

 

The ravine of the title of Cuban-born, Canary Island writer Nivaria Tejera’s 1958 book is not only a literal barranco into which the bodies of Republican supporters were tossed by Franco supporters, but the vast gap between the young narrator’s childhood comprehension of the events taking place at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the realities faced by the adults surrounding her. It is, moreover, the gaping hole between the reality of the past and the nightmare of all Spanish citizens during Franco’s bloody struggle to dictatorship.

 

    For the seven-year-old girl in the Canary Island city of La Laguna, “the war started today,” an indeterminate now which radically changes her life and allows her no return to the normality of the past where the daily joys of childhood were determined by the comings and goings of her beloved father. In fact, the Spanish Civil War did begin at the very center of her existence, in the Canary and Balearic Islands to which General Francesco Franco and General Manuel Goded Llopis had been exiled. On July 18, 1936 both quickly took control of these islands before moving on to Spanish Morocco and back into Spain itself.

     The young narrator, a figure based, in part, upon the author, is suddenly forced to come face to face with Franco’s squads as they search her family’s home; her father, a Republican supporter, has gone into hiding and is soon after arrested and imprisoned in Faife, the local prison created from warehouses formerly owned by a British trading company. Later exonerated of criminal behavior, her father briefly returns home only to be arrested again and ultimately placed in an unnamed prison where the family has no possibility of discovering him. And so this middle class family of workers—an extended family that includes uncles, aunts and grandparents—is suddenly reduced to complete poverty, while they face the fact that they may never see their son, lover, papa, breadwinner again.

     Tejera’s tale, however, is not about the civil war nor the struggles of the surrounding adults, but is centered firmly on the young girl trying to suddenly understand not only events conspiring against her family but the larger events of world war and human morality. Embarrassed by her sudden poverty and daily assignment to beg for groceries from a nearby shopkeeper, confused by the new passivity and depression of the adults around her, and lonely, the girl is transformed from a normal child into a stumbling, bumbling beast of contrary feelings whom her former friends now taunt and openly despise. With a younger child to care for, her mother thrusts upon the girl responsibilities that only exacerbate her difficulties. As she retreats to her internal thoughts, so too does Tejera’s writing, ultimately turning what might have been a somewhat painful but perhaps maudlin story of hardship into a surreal portrayal of the effects of war not unlike Mohammed Dib’s great wartime story of Algeria, Who Remembers the Sea.

    For the most part Tejera succeeds in convincing us of the narrator’s point of view, in part because of what she describes as “a dialogue between past and present,” the voice of the little girl ambivalently fusing with the later adult voice of the author herself.

     Translator Carol Maier spends a great deal of her afterword accounting for and justifying what may seem as inconsistencies between the voice; she admits to attempting, at first, to correct in English for those moments of adult knowledge that creep into the childhood narrative. For me, this seems beside the point. There can never be a truly childhood voice in a fiction written by an adult, simply because if one were miraculously to accomplish the transformation into childhood it would cease being of interest to the adult. Children can express wondrously beautiful and fanciful images of reality which we can enjoy, but they cannot embrace the realities of that beauty and the meaning of the images they have portrayed. Frankly, I prefer the kind of childhood characters created by Ivy Compton-Burnett, children who speak more intelligent and impeccably stylized sentences than their adult counterparts. Yet Tejera succeeds in convincing us that the world she portrays is skewed toward a child-like vision. And particularly in the final last visionary dreamscape of the fiction, the reader can only be touched by that world evoked. Insistent that she will go to search for her father in the ravine, the young narrator imagines the following dialogue:

 

                      “Niñaniña, don’t you suspect? It’s still the zinc rain and the sound from the

                      canyon still whistles through the planted fields. Aren’t you going to make

                      little stripes, aren’t you coming to the planet?” I’ll go, I will definitely go,

                      Mama. It’s at the bend beside where I think, in the puppet pit, I’ll go on

                      the wounded train, in the mirror. It’s winter now, the roads are riddled with

                      puddles and it’s nice to travel through the dirty trees toward the sky. …I see

                      him already, first he’ll lift up the dry hard bones that will be hitting me. I

                      already feel them hitting me. The rain’s softened them and they don’t hurt.

                      In the fog, they seem like insects, they’re wet and they stick to your body.

                      They do. Don’t you hear? Someone’s calling me from further away. It’s

                      the custodian, his garbage, the great wind beside the ravine covering,

                      covering the putrid place of the peloton, where I liked to think Papa would 

                      never lie dead.

                           I’ll go and the great wind will come whirling from the bottom.

                           And I’ll be there looking down.

 

    For both her young narrator and the author herself, looking down with humility—like Alice, looking into the Rabbit Hole—is the only possibility, for there is no way to “look back.” The father will never again be found for that little girl. By the time Tereja’s father was released in 1944 and the family was able to return to Cuba, she was a fifteen-year-old adolescent, a young woman inevitably aged by her childhood experiences. In 1954 Tejera moved to Paris, serving the Cuban government for a period as a cultural attaché in Rome before breaking political ties with Cuba in 1965. Today she lives in Paris, writing poetry and fiction.

 

Orange, California, April 17, 2008

Rain Taxi (Spring 2008).