Until Christmas Next
/a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
I went for a walk through my old stomping ground in Newbury last week, a participant in a tour led by Dr. Tricia Peone, a research scholar at Historic New England. The walk, A Story of Slavery and Resistance in Newbury, centered on the story of an enslaved man named James, who escaped from the house of Richard Dole in 1690, near the site of the present Dole-Little House. James set off to join an ultimately unsuccessful uprising intended to free Newbury’s enslaved people and kill the townspeople. Dole-Little was under my management for two decades, a sleepy place better known for its repurposed timbers than its connection to enslavement and revolt and revisiting the site with this new and fascinating information was a rich and enlightening experience.
At the end of the walk, we all stood in a circle chatting and asking questions of Dr. Peone. One man asked how Dole’s descendants must feel knowing that he enslaved at least eight people on that site. He cast his eyes around the group. “Any Dole descendants here?” Several people I know in the crowd pointed to me, as my hand was slowly raised. The man turned to me, eyes flashing. He was having an experience. “How do you feel about that?” he said, pointing his finger at me. “Your family owned slaves. How does that make you feel?”
The c. 1715 Dole Little House, 289 High Road, Newbury. Photo by Bob Watts.
When confronted by something terrible or tragic, I often find myself at odds with the people around me. In my youth, I would have tried to determine how this man wanted me to feel and pretend to feel that way. He was angry, rightfully so, but what I felt was not shame, or anger, or guilt, although there is plenty of that to go around. My prevailing feeling at that time was that this story, this research that had illuminated a part of the past that had been ignored for so long, was beautiful and wonderful, and I was thrilled, and I said so. Let the sun shine on all of it, I said.
Let me just say, being at odds with the crowd has its advantages. I am great in an emergency. If the house is on fire, you want me there, methodically counting the pets and the silver. For many years, I felt bad about this. One of the beautiful things about getting older, however, at least for me, has been a calm curiosity about how I am reacting to a situation, a certain forgiveness when I am awkward, or silly, or detached when all around me are reacting. But I don’t get to skip it, whatever it is. It comes for me.
As I left the tour of the Dole-Little House, a heaviness settled on me. It is the same feeling I had when I found a death certificate for an early 20th century ancestor who had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and who I had been researching. The record proved a family story that they had choked to death. First, elation at being able to find the elusive thing, a research victory. Then a crush, a heaviness. Whatever my genealogical victory, they were human, and they suffered, and being human, I feel some measure of it.
Last night, I woke suddenly from another dream in which armed men with dogs hunted me and my children as we hid in the dark woods. There were three children in the dream, and I knew immediately why.
We were contacted last week by a man from Exeter, New Hampshire. He had purchased a collection of letters and found within the collection several receipts relating to Newburyport town business during the American Revolution. Men were working on the schoolhouse chimney, repairing the poor house, and in the case of Abel Greenleaf, taking care of a Mrs. Havoy at the town’s expense from March 1782 to January 1783. The man on the phone asked if we had ever heard of the Greenleaf family. I snorted and consulted my chart, packed with Greenleafs, and there was Abel, my 1st cousin, 7x removed. I talked the possible donor into coming down to visit the museum, knowing that he would be utterly charmed. I was right, and he was, in turn, utterly charming, a lover of history and family, whose interest was in returning these valuable documents to a place where these people could be known. He took a tour, we had a lovely chat, and then, just as he was leaving, he paused.
“Can I just ask you…” he trailed off. “I have these other things, and I really don’t know what to do with them.”
And then, as he pulled another sheaf of letters from a folder, he said, “my Black friends said to burn them”.
He handed me the letters and asked me to help find the right place for them to be of use to future generations, and he signed the necessary paperwork to donate all his treasures to the Museum of Old Newbury. He choked up as he left. He had been carrying a heavy burden.
John Denison letter of obligation to V.G. Wheat, 1859, Bourbon County, KY.
There were three separate documents in the collection he had given us, ten pages total. All of them are from Kentucky, and all relate to the sale, rental, and barter of enslaved women, children, and men, identified by name, age, and in some cases, monetary value. As I sat down with them and began to read, I had a familiar feeling, like I was outside my body, curious and detached. I paid attention. The last document I read was a March 1859 agreement between John Denison and V.G. Wheat for the hire of “a negro woman and her three children until Christmas next”. The woman, Ann, and her children, were owned by a 16-year-old, B.D. Estill, for whom Wheat was the guardian, and they were rented out to John Denison in exchange for their food and “two cotton dresses, two chemmies (chemises), two linsey dresses, two pair stockings, two pair shoes, one undershirt of linsey, and a blanket.”
Two weeks ago, the Museum of Old Newbury led a community reading of Frederick Douglass’ powerful 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” in the shadow of the William Lloyd Garrison statue in Brown Square. It is a community event, supported by Mass Humanities, where volunteers take turns reading passages from the speech to the assembly. No passages are assigned, and so I found myself reading these lines.
Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call into question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery – the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.”
Reading Frederick Douglass Together in Brown Square, Newburyport on July 3, 2022. The statue of William Lloyd Garrison bears the words that Douglass quoted in his speech.
Standing with my face to the statue upon which were written these very words, I read them as Douglass wrote them. “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse…” and I felt those words as a punch to the chest, my body reacting to Douglass’ quoting of Garrison, who stood in front of me, grown from the soil of my town, surrounded by my family. Garrison, who went to prison for pointing out how Newburyport families were directly involved in the buying and selling of human beings in the United States, laying plain our community’s responsibility for the life of a woman and her three children in Kentucky in 1859.
We are working with archivists in Kentucky to ensure that these letters go to a place where they will be preserved, digitized, and available. If Ann’s children lived, if they told their children about their mother, if they know what county they lived in, if they are looking, they will find this document. But I will never forget her. This is the power of the original artifact. It will come for you. We must not equivocate. We must not excuse.
