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On a brutally cold Saturday in January, my family and I are on the stairs of theNational Museum of the American Indian,waiting to begin aNYC Slavery and the Underground RailroadTourthat covers the financial district. We are the only brown people in the 12-person group, and I am giving Sean O’Brien, our white tour guide, a long side eye. After all, this is a tour of the Underground Railroad. Shouldn’t the guide, like the people who moved toward freedom, carry some African DNA? I’m beyond skeptical.
My children, at 8 and 14, are glowering. Just an hour earlier, my partner and I wrangled them from the warmth of their rooms and the sweet oblivion of their rerun streams of ’90s sitcoms to this moment. The youngest yelled from upstairs, “This is something you guys care about, not us!” And he was right. Why would they want to spend a morning walking the freezing streets of Lower Manhattan? And if I weren’t a mom, I might have said this, and the tour would have been over before it began.
But Iama mom so instead, I yelled back up, “You wouldn’t be here now if your ancestors had whined about not wanting to go!” The truth is, none of us really wanted to go. Easier (and warmer) to stay home and rereadColson Whitehead’s phenomenal “The Underground Railroad” or watch the remake of “Roots.” Or even better, stream “black-ish” and have a few laughs while paying homage to our past. But, like our ancestors, we are not living in an easy time. Some of their tools, foresight and resistance are already very much needed.“Be down in 15 minutes or every device will be taken away for a week.”
Still, we arrive 10 minutes late for a tour that asks everyone to be 15 minutes early.
In my 20s and early 30s, when writing was still the sideline thing I hoped to one day not be so sideline, I walked the Lower Manhattan streets to my job as a word-processing temp. It was awful work that brought me each weekday morning either to the World Trade Center or to Wall Street to be ordered about by mergers-and-acquisitions bankers working for companies that no longer exist — Bankers Trust, Prudential-Bache, Manufacturers Hanover.
As I walked along Pearl Street then, I had no idea thatFraunces Tavernhad been owned by Samuel Fraunces, a man whose true racial identity continues to be in question — many believe he was of mixed race and passing as white. There are white folks who vehemently disagree. During the Revolutionary War, he was referred to as “Black Sam” and Fraunces Tavern was called Black Sam’s. Hmm … Fraunces also served as a steward to George Washington.
As Sean drops this bit of knowledge, my children perk up — having seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” they consider themselves scholars on the subject of our founding father. Suddenly this tour is relevant. Across from the tavern stands the spot of the first presidential mansion (demolished in 1856) where Samuel Fraunces managed the presidential staff.
For me, New York is a city that is continually unlocking new doors — the tour is one that is at once devastating and amazingly empowering. When Sean stops our small group at Philipse Well on Pearl Street, we stand around it, staring down as he explains how this cistern exists on what was once the Philipse family’s property and was a place where enslaved people were allowed to gather and engage with one another as they drew water. Any other gathering among more than three enslaved people was against the law.
I had grown up believing New York to be a free state, but being one of the early free states and being a truly free state were very different.
I learn that under British rule, enslaved people were treated worse than any other group of enslaved people in history. I watch my children watching Sean, who I have now decided is nothing short of exceptional, discuss the complexities of race, the importance of gathering, the genius and resilience of enslaved people. The group stares down into the well for a few somber moments, then moves on.
At the intersection of Water and Wall Streets, we come to the place where one of the biggest markets in the world once stood — New York City’s first slave market. Standing besidea plaque memorializing the spot,we get a brief (and as child-friendly as possible) history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, from the late 16th century to the early 19th century. We hear more about the triangular trading system that carried enslaved people, manufactured goods and cash crops between West Africa, the Caribbean, America, Europe and the British colonies, learning how the enslavement of African people was part of the world’s economy.
In an attempt to make a life-to-text connection, I whisper to my daughter that she read about this in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me.” Radio silence and eyeroll — which mean I’m getting through to her. Throughout the tour, Sean counters the brutality and inhumanity of enslavement with information about the constant uprisings and opposition. Because this is a tour company that also provides educational tours to school groups, Sean’s clarity engages my son, who by this point is walking beside him.
We move on to 5 Broad Street where we stand in front of the former location of Downing’s Oyster House, where Thomas Downing, the son of freed slaves, catered to aristocracy in his lush restaurant, while his son, George, helped hide runaway slaves en route north in the basement.
Bounty hunters, or “blackbirders,” as we learned they were called, roamed Manhattan in search of escapees. Even though slavery was abolished in New York in 1827, not all black folks living in New York were free. And the Fugitive Slave Act didn’t help!
Then Sean lets us know that whileAlexander Hamiltonwas a man of manumissions who had a complicated history with slavery, the family of his wife, Eliza, were slaveholders. The disappointment in Eliza is clear on the faces of both children. In “Hamilton,” she is beloved, a hero. But on the tour, by my children, not so much anymore.
There is something else going on. I watch my children beginning to understand the complexity of the city they’ve always known and loved deeply. They are coming to know that the history of their New York speaks to an even deeper history of their country, and to the fact that only a few subway stops away from our Brooklyn home, we can walk the same streets our ancestors walked — freely.
From the slave revolts of 1712 and 1741 to the notorious“Bonfires of the Negroes”(where enslaved people, rumored to be planning an uprising, were publicly burned) at Foley Square to David Ruggles’s rescue ofFrederick Douglassto theDraft Riots of 1863,this tour was nothing short of amazing.
So amazing, that a few days later I tried to track Sean down to thank him. My message landed in the hands of the owner ofInside Out Tours,Stacey Toussaint, a young mom, a graduate of Packer Collegiate Institute and of Columbia Law, the daughter of Haitian immigrants.
Ms. Toussaint began the company with her friend, Sheila Collins. The plan was to give socially responsible and thoughtful tours of this great and complicated city. Her wealth of knowledge, her cleareyed approach, her stories and passion and honest commitment to African-American history reminded me of some of my best teachers in high school — the ones who made me laugh while learning, the ones who made me hungry for more. I saw this in the faces of my children. As Sean told the story of Ellen Craft, a light-skinned enslaved woman who escaped with her husband, William Craft, into freedom by passing as a white man and posing as his master, I saw my daughter smile — a smile that spoke to the pride of coming to this moment through a history of resistance.
“Sankofa” is a Twi word from the Akan tribe in Ghana. The translation is “go back and take what is at risk of being left behind.” As my partner and I endeavor to raise thoughtful and engaged children, we know a deep knowledge of this country’s past will help them not only survive this moment but realize a future beyond it. The history of New York’s Underground Railroad — the financial and physical ramifications of enslavement here, the streets we walk on every day and the bodies that built them — is a narrative we all need to know as we move toward this country’s future. When I asked my children what they thought of the tour, both said, “It was good.” Which is teen and ’tween for, “It wasreallygood.”
As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty, that even in its most brutal moments, did not,could not,kill our resilient and powerful spirit.
(NYT)
