The Slaves Have Names

The Slave Cemetery

 

The graveyard sits in a copse of trees surrounded by a deteriorating stone wall.  Most who know these farms well know it’s there, but I don’t think anyone really visits except me.  My favorite person from this place is buried here. His name is Primus, and I think he can hear me.

In the late afternoons sometimes, I walk up and talk to the folks who are buried in the undulating earth, most of their graves are unmarked by any stone except, perhaps, two pieces of slate stuck vertically in the ground, one at head and one at foot, and long worn down or washed clean of names.  But three stones bear words, gifts cut into rock – Ben Creasy, the carpenter, Jesse Nicholas, the stonemason, and Primus, the foreman. 

Ben and Jesse’s stones are clear – with their names and dates marked deeply in the sandstone. I can find them in the records – know for sure who they are.

Primus’s stone is harder to know. The tradition here on the farm is that Primus the foreman at Upper Bremo is buried here, but I cannot be sure. The stone reads “Prams – 12,” and I’m not sure that it refers to this Primus.  It may be his grandson, also Primus, or some person I don’t know yet.  It’s the 12 that throws me – the Primus I know lived to be an old man, long past 1812 – his death date is noted – 1849. That date seems right according to the records, but then, the records are so sparse; it’s hard to know.  I don’t know how to solidify - to give storied flesh - to these rough marks hewn deep into stone.

Still, I expect the Primus I know best is buried here, somewhere, and it’s to him that I speak.  On days when the world just doesn’t make sense, I tell him the tangles . . . and in the breathing air of that cemetery, I feel the strands loosen, as if Primus has taken them in his strong, wide fingers and untwisted them.

In that cemetery, at least 100 people are buried.  Their graves unmarked, their stories untold.  Their lives left twisted-together strands:  a note about a doctor’s visit, a listing on an inventory, a mention in a diary or letter.  Primus cannot stretch out their stories.  Though, I expect him to. He is the patriarch of this place to me. The man who I see carrying the stories. Yet, I cannot hear him speak them.

In these gravestones, it is the absence of rock that reveals, what has been carved away that speaks. Some days it feels like I am making stories from the finest dust.  Holy, frustrating, heart-breaking work.

***

One winter morning, I was walking the grounds of this place, up the road from the graveyard, deep in the grief of my mother’s death a month past.  The frost was heavy, and as I came around the corner by the biggest house here, I saw the last standing mulberry tree, the final remnant of the original owner’s quick money plan for raising silkworms.  The tree is long since healthy, now just a craggy trunk with a few branches spread thin and wide, like the last, wide-spaced breaths of life. 

But this morning, the frost had glittered the spider webs that hung in these branches, ornaments created, it seemed, for me.

On this same path a few weeks before, Someone had whispered for just my ears, “Write about the slaves.”  I stopped my stride. Tears pricked my eyes.  I knew this to be a request, a suggestion, a marker for the next steps of this life journey.  Gifts hang in the air.

So I began, I began with the stories I knew . . . the few stories of Primus and Cato, whose names had survived in the owner’s family stories for reasons no one knew. The letters collected from slaves emancipated to Liberia.  The stories local historians could tell me.  The 195 boxes tucked into acid-free folders inside archival crates in climate-controlled rooms at the University of Virginia. And I began to craft my own ornaments, tiny stories to hang on the tree that is this place.

Now, as I pass that mulberry, I see these stories, the tales slaves whispered to themselves as they passed that same tree, then ripe with green.  The narratives written in the journals the master here kept.  The anecdotes told in the stables as slave postilions prepared the horses to be hitched up.  The legends repeated as the rare group of visitors sees this place now, the same as it ever was . . . almost.

The tree is filling out with ornaments, mostly unnoticed except in the right light by eyes that are ready and willing.  The stories I most want told.
Sometime in college - when my world swung wider and I saw oppression in the lectures and slides of classes - it occurred to me that I had never heard talk of the people who built these plantations that I call home. Silence surrounded these enslaved people.

As I thought deeper into this silence, I came to imagine - wrongly I now know - that the people I rode the bus with most days in high school - the black people who filled every seat but those held by my brother and I - may have been descended from the people who built the buildings and cleared the land that now gave my family its livelihood.

I wanted those stories, to wrap them like beads around my wrist.   I wanted to know these people because, it seemed, no one else knew them or cared to. 

The silence around the lives of 246 men, women, and children finally screamed out to me in that whispered morning.  It was time. 

***

This, then, is the story of people, people nearly forgotten and unnamed in the history of this place.  The story of slavery, the story of presence in absence and voice in silence.  It is also my story, the story of how 246 enslaved people pulled me back to life when it seemed the death of my mother might silence me forever.  I am indebted to them – 246 people who barely make a note in our written history – for my life and for this book.  To them, and to my mother, I say, “You will not be forgotten. YOU will not be forgotten.”