Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North

It is impossible for our country to make real progress in a discussion of race if we continue to ignore half our nation's history. Yet few Americans understand the troubling realities of slavery in the North -- its extent, its violence, its pervasive grip. Instead, a comfortable amnesia has its hold.

"Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North," (Princeton University Press, January 20, 2010) fills this gap, telling the powerful story of five generations of slave owners and slave traders who owned a 600-acre farm first settled by the famous Puritan John Winthrop in 1631. Winthrop, founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and author of the famous sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," gave us the notion of America as a "city upon a hill." It is a stirring thought, one that has been used by politicians ever since, implying that here was a noble experiment that all the world could watch and judge. The nobility is retained. The more difficult realities have been effectively obscured. Winthrop gave us stirring words and a cry for religious freedom we still hear. But he also gave us the first law in North America officially condoning Native American and African slavery. That law was inked in 1641, three years after black slaves already had been bought and sold in Massachusetts. Winthrop's famous city on a hill was a segregated city, a city with slaves. In the North, it stayed that way for more than 150 years.

A century and a half. Yet who, in this century, knows this part of Northern history? When he rented a small basement apartment in Somerville, did the young law student, Barack Obama, understand he lived on ground once worked by slaves or that the law school seal incorporated the seal of its founder, a man who once owned Ten Hills Farm and made a fortune in the slave trade and sugar in Antigua? Perhaps he did. If so, he was the rare American.

It is easy to dismiss this material today, to say that slavery in the North was softer, shorter-lived, somehow intrinsically more "benign" than slavery in the South. But is it true? Knowing half the story is not enough. The following is excerpted from the opening of "Ten Hills Farm.''

Letter from Antigua

History in this hot and weathered place lies scattered in plain sight. I touch something with the toe of my shoe. It is a piece of china, a cup shard, a glint of ancient porcelain, blue and white against the brown. And here, a fragment of a bowl decorated in delicate pat­terns of leaves. Trash amid the stones. I pluck several pieces from the dirt that makes a sidewalk just outside Antigua's National Ar­chives in St. John's, startled to discover such bounty underfoot in this most public of spaces. No less than the papers inside, these shards tell a story. It is the story of whites who lived in style and luxury and built great fortunes on the backs of other men.

I've been drawn to the path by the seductive thump of drums. It pulls me from my work inside, reviewing fuzzy microfilm and brittle texts. As I head out, Dr. Marion Blair -- the director of the archives, her hair cropped almost to her scalp, her gaze that of a woman who has seen it all, and more than once -- says she be­lieves it is a march by students in a protest against crime. Dr. Blair ("Marion" to a young black woman exploring her family's past) addresses me rather formally with a rich Antiguan roll. The words sound strange to my more northern ear, and I must pause to let them translate in my head.

Outside in the keen noon light the drumming is boisterous and hundreds of students fill the road, blocking all traffic. They are marching in their various school uniforms -- not a white face among them -- making a sea of red and blue and gold and black.

Some carry placards. A few are singing. Hand-lettered signs call out for better times: Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with ME. These are shards that tell a different story. It is the story of blacks whose ancestors were slaves who labored without free­dom on a soil far from home.

An editorial in the Antigua Sun coinciding with the march re­flects upon a recent study showing Caribbean youths between the ages of 15 and 17 as more likely to die by homicide than any other group their age around the world."We need to add nothing more," the newspaper's editors conclude. Yet people do: It is the bitter legacy of slavery, say some. The crap left behind by a corrupt gov­ernment, say others. "Cultural," one older white man says without elaboration. I write it all down as it comes.

Rich and poor. Black and white. Protected, vulnerable. Divisions on this small Caribbean island are not as clear as they once were. In the affluent seaside community where long ago a New Englander named Isaac Royall made his home and built his fortune, it is im­possible to tell whether a black family or white sits down to dinner back behind new walls and heavy gates. The community is racially mixed, and fairly affluent. The houses are built well. The grounds are trim and neat. Gardens receive care and plenty of water and give reward in crazy explosions of color and perfume. Yet there is a constant sense of vulnerability as well.

In the absence of effective policing most residences are protected by huge dogs -- rottweilers, ridgebacks, bulldogs, mutts -- who, though gentle with their mas­ters, could rip an intruder to pieces in a single, unforgiving flash of teeth. They thunder toward the fences, jaws open, haunches tucked, whenever strangers wander by. Though the fences hold them back, the strangers always fl inch, and I do, too, and begin to drive even short distances, against a lifelong habit to the contrary.

In the houses the dogs are much discussed: the breed, the loyalty, the temperament, the potential to inflict a lethal wound. Where I stay there are three acres and six dogs. One is old and blind and nearly lame. Three others are massive coils of muscle and vitality. A pup has joined the crew. He will be big when fully grown. There is another puppy, too, brought home this week, a silly blur of black and white that will never grow much bigger than a cat. She cuddles like a child and stays mostly upstairs.

In poorer enclaves the dogs run free and fight for scraps. There, the population is a monochrome, every face caught somewhere on a broad continuum of dark. In those places life is hard and the most pressing task is just the struggle to make do. Cars are luxury. Buses run infrequently. Water, always an issue on an island with a chronic scarcity, is hauled about in buckets. Sewage slides in open gutters. Houses are spare in the way that houses of the very poor are spare in warmer climates everywhere: shacks made simply with a room or two and not much in them but the breath­ing, laughing, quarreling of many.

Down one severely rutted deep back road that proves harder to navigate by car than on foot, a man in copious dreadlocks marshaled by a knitted hat in Africa's red, yellow, green, emerges from a shack at dusk to brush his teeth with water from a large tin bucket. Yards away a group of children plays soccer in the dust and a woman in her forties, who looks older, is almost home, her shoes worn nearly through.

A few miles south lies another extreme, the Mill Reef Club, a storied playground of social ascendancy open only by invitation to those of finest pedigree and flawless manners tuned at dinner tables and boarding schools around the world. There, pale fami­lies tucked beside clean, azure waters are cosseted by black hands (and the occasional white yoga instructor) from dawn to well past dusk. It is generally a simple matter to spot the people heading for that walled-off life. In the waiting room at the international airport in Puerto Rico, a woman with shoulder-length carrot hair wearing perfectly pressed khakis and a navy blue jacket adorned with big gold buttons disdainfully flicks a soiled Kleenex to the floor, then rests her brilliant orange new suede shoes atop the seat across from her. When her daughter leans in close to repri­mand, the woman -- who appears not long out of boarding school herself -- puts one foot up to her daughter's face, perhaps to show how her feet, amazingly, are never dirty, or at least to tell the child to back off. The feet remain at altitude while the woman busies herself on her Blackberry and the girl chats sullenly with a brother.

The father, a towering dark-haired American dressed exactly like his wife (but for the shoes and bright gold buttons) is distracted, calling someone in New York to inquire without preamble: "How is the market?" Hours later, disembarking in the noontime heat at the Antigua airport, the family stops beside a stately black woman holding a small sign printed with the club's name. Though several of my favorite people vacation at the Mill Reef every year, and have for decades, this pair fits every ugly stereotype I harbor. Then again, I know too much to ever see the club as just a simple place of sun and sand.

As John Fuller, an attorney in St. John's, so aptly puts it, "Then it was sugar. Now it is sun. All we changed is what we sell."

I am staying with John and his wife at Hodges Bay near land Isaac Royall once controlled. It is Isaac Royall, long dead, and his legacy, still very much alive, that call me here to this place near Beggars Point. I have learned that man's history and followed his trajectory and engaged myself with his ambition and his flaws and now I sift the sand of his beach between my toes and speak with people whose forebears in another time he might have owned. To­day there is no Royall listed in the phone book. But the name and legacy are still attached to a tiny bay, a shop, a housing cluster, a dot on fraying maps.

John and Sarah Fuller, émigrés from England and America, have made a full life here and hold a complex view of the island and its history. Mostly, though, like anyone, they simply live their lives, hosting a constant flow of children, friends, gardeners, assistants, birds, puppies, lizards, mosquitoes, mongooses, and, of course, the dogs. Laughter often spills out of their house. Visitors come and go throughout the day. They are black and white, related, not related, British, American, and Antiguan.

Here on this hot and gritty land a short sail from the equator I am finishing a book about America. For three years I have known my work would draw me to this place. It takes a book to explain why. This is that book. It is not a history in the classic academic sense. It is, instead, a story, and a true one, about a six-hundred­ acre farm just north of Boston... It is the story of a piece of ground near Boston, today a busy metropolis with part of its memory wiped almost clear. May this book restore that memory.

csm
Hodges Bay, Antigua

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