"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City

In October 2021, the African Burial Ground National Monument commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the New York City slave cemetery’s rediscovery by the General Services Administration (GSA). In 1991, the GSA started construction on a federal building and unearthed the “Negro Burial Ground”—two centuries after the cemetery had closed. In the process, GSA desecrated some of the 419 ancestral remains they exhumed (a backhoe damaged twenty bodies). Though the US government requires federally funded projects to conduct archaeological/historical property surveys and include descendant communities in the process, GSA continued to build and barely complied with either requirement.

Black New Yorkers protested. The city’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins, sent GSA a cease-and-desist letter. GSA kept building and extracting and only temporarily halted construction when Illinois Congressperson Gus Savage and President George W. Bush intervened. African-descended community members subsequently and ceremonially re-interred those disturbed remains beside the completed federal building in 2003 (a decade earlier, the cemetery had been added to the National Register of Historic Places). GSA eventually financed the construction of a burial ground monument, but GSA’s federal edifice still rises above the bones of enslaved New Yorkers.

I grew up in New York City and attended local schools. I worked afternoons at One Liberty Plaza—then the original One World Trade Center—during high school, and also worked one college summer at One Hanover Square. I could have walked approximately fifteen minutes from each of those jobs and reached the African Burial Ground—this country’s oldest and largest slave cemetery, where roughly 15,000 ancestors were buried between 1712 and 1795 in a seven-acre plot. Yet I, a culturally curious Black New Yorker who had sauntered in the vicinity of that sacred space over a six-year period, had not known the cemetery existed until I reached my thirties. Nor had I known that Wall Street got its name from a wall that Dutch colonists had enslaved Africans construct in 1653. Nor had I known that colonial New York had the second-largest urban slave population, behind only Charleston, South Carolina—North America’s largest slaving port.

Both shock and reverence drove me to pen and paper, to history and song. Drove me to my go-to: poetry. To imaginatively excavate these enslaved ancestors, I wrote a collection of poems entitled Boneyarn (2021). I primed my creative pump by reading historical studies such as In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World by Judith Ann Carney (2002), New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore (2006), and The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space by Andrea E. Frohne (2015). I made numerous pilgrimages to the African Burial Ground Monument, its black granite ancestral chamber and seven ancestral mounds.

In her oft-quoted “The Dash Poem,” Linda Ellis refers “to the dates on the tombstone” and observes, “what mattered most of all / Was the dash between those years.” These lines gave me pause because for 99.9 percent of the enslaved New Yorkers I wished to poetically resurrect, I knew neither the dates of their harrowing lives nor the dashes.

My research did not solve my problem. Books such as Joyce Hansen and Gary McGowan’s Breaking Ground, Breaking Silence: The Story of New York’s African Burial Ground (1998) documented exhumed ancestors’ approximate ages, genders, extraordinary bone stresses from heavy lifting, nutritional deficits, and likely causes of death. (Countless children under four died from overwork and poor diet.) But virtually no names; no dashes nor dates. Just bones.

Sometimes I came across anecdotes about enslaved individuals with names—such as a free-spirited petty thief, Caesar, who was hanged by colonists following the 1741 New York Slave Conspiracy. I pieced together snippets of Caesar’s life and assumed he was interred among those 15,000 bodies. But where? Rather than be hampered by the unanswerable, I decided that a cemetery can function as a deceased’s repository for a life lived. Hence, Boneyarn focuses on New York’s slave cemetery not only as hallowed ground but also as a point of creative and historical departure. A poetic Sankofa.

In my poems, I aim to transport readers to these long-forgotten horrors, to vividly portray this excruciating past with sensory and graphic immediacy: the abuse, the terror, the torture, the slave codes, individuals worked to death, forearms interred where shins should be.

Two kinds of poems figure prominently in my efforts. Fourteen “dialogue” pieces (all titled “Talking to the Bones” and written to thoughtfully engage an ancestor) find a contemporary speaker asking questions of eighteenth-century bones, such as those of a twenty-something enslaved woman. (Researchers determined that she had been shot and killed because of a musket ball found lodged in the remains of her rib cage.) The poem’s speaker concludes the exchange by asking the woman’s “bones,” “why only a right rib cage?” Her spirit replies: “What we leave the earth / when we leave the earth / is not ours to say.”

I could not locate any slave narratives penned by New York’s enslaved. Nor could I pinpoint where, for example, an enslaved New York City chimney sweep apprentice or cook is buried in the Negro Burial Ground. But I assume individuals such as these were interred there. So, how to poetically resurrect them?

I wrote compressed but full-bodied persona poems of less than forty lines each that magnified and rescued from near obscurity many slaves’ lives. In one poem, a disfigured chimney sweep apprentice states: “I’m what happens when da house breathe / out: sore black breath in a New York throat.” In another piece, Peggy, a cook toiling in a scalding cellar, declares: “I got dark a’thority. Some down below / and bit of up-above say so.” I believed that telling details in an eighteenth-century vernacular, which possessed an off-the-cuff, conversational quality, would create distinct individualities and enhance a reader’s grasp of an enslaved New Yorker’s experiences.

I turned to longer, narrative poems to capture New York slavery’s outsized injustices, such as when colonists burned at the stake and hanged thirty enslaved people following the 1741 Slave Conspiracy. In each lengthier piece, I strove to depict historically resonant figures. In the poem “Assignment” (about the 1788 Doctors’ Riot in which Columbia Medical School students robbed black bodies from graves), I write: “The dead / had no standing as property. Only two-legged real / estate could’ve properly been considered property.” In the poem “Auction,” I describe in unsettling, ironic lines the arrival of countless Africans in New York: “the squinting / whys in those abducted eyes: / what the ocean failed to answer: hell’s / first hello.” Some of my poems acknowledge the ancestors’ retention of African cultural traditions—including minkisi and Juba dances. In these poems, I honor them in ink.

In response to two centuries of silence, GSA’s complicated honoring of the site, and 15,000 unidentified bodies, I extended an imaginative hand to undertake an inventive exhumation and foreground enslaved New Yorkers’ inner lives and agonizing physical existence. In part, I created Boneyarn’s Black chorus to redress what I was not taught in my own backyard. To paraphrase the final lines of the poet Robert Hayden’s quasi-sonnet “Those Winter Sundays”: “What did I know? What did I know of my history’s austere and lonely offices?” With Boneyarn, I pray I paid the ancestors my poetic respects.

CLASSROOM EXERCISE

After reading from Boneyarn, I ask my students to choose one of eight uncaptioned burial photos from Andrea Frohne’s African Burial Ground in New York City and Joyce Hansen and Gary McGowan’s Breaking Ground, Breaking Silence. I then ask the students to write freely about their photos. After that, I encourage them to imagine that they can “ask” the pictured “bones” the “Five Ws” (who, what, when, where, and why) about life and death during slavery. To do this exercise, students must closely examine the photos. Students’ responses should be grounded in history but also imaginative. Following the exercise, I share the facts behind each photo and ask participants if those facts alter their initial responses to the images.

David Mills, a poet, playwright, and educator, is the author of four books of poetry: Boneyarn (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021), a series of poems inspired by Manhattan’s African Burial Ground; After Mistic (New Feral Press, 2020); The Sudden Country (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2013), and The Dream Detective (Straw Gate Books, 2009). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Obsidian, Brooklyn Rail, Diode Journal, and Fence. He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf, the American Antiquarian Society, the Lannan Foundation, Arts Link, and other organizations.