By Aislinn Bass-Adams
2020

The tiny plot was what had been set aside now to indicate the spot, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the site had been large, some six acres, as far north as present-day Duane Street, and as far south as City Hall Park. Along Chambers Street and in the park itself, human remains were still routinely uncovered. But most of the burial ground was now under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies, all the endless hum of quotidian commerce and government. Into this earth had been interred the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand blacks, most of them slaves, but then the land had been built over and the people of the city had forgotten that it was a burial ground.

Open City

Those are the musings of Julius, the narrator of Teju Cole’s Open City, as he walks through downtown Manhattan, passing a memorial on the corner of Duane and Elk Street. The memorial, which is officially known as the African Burial Ground, is considered a National Monument of New York. What it memorializes is the burial site, in downtown Manhattan, of thousands of black New Yorkers, many of them slaves, between the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a grisly part of New York’s history, one that almost seems like a bad horror trope: “The bodies were under the house all along,” but for many people who live and work in Downtown Manhattan, it is a literal reality. There are thousands of people, living and working among “Buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies” which now serve as concrete grave markers for hundreds of yet-to-be-found bodies.

The very fact that Manhattan became a hidden burial ground is in itself a horrific piece of history. When the island was first settled by the Dutch, and still known as New Amsterdam, it was built with slave labor. The Dutch declared conditional freedom to a group of slaves in New Amsterdam in 1640, but refused to allow them to live (and bury their dead) within city limits (“African Burial Ground”). Instead, the now-free black population settled outside of city limits, on the margins of New Amsterdam. It is believed that around this time, the graveyard was first established. The graveyard’s very existence stems from a refusal to allow black dead and white dead to be buried in the same land, and a refusal to allow deceased Africans to rest on the holy land of the first Christian churches in Manhattan. Although the graveyard is believed to have been founded by free Africans, it was not just free Africans who were buried beneath its soil. Of the 419 exhumed bodies on just one corner of Manhattan, well over half are believed to be slaves, a fact established by Howard University’s analysis of burial rites, skeletal structure, genetic tracing from bone marrow, and chemical analysis of teeth. Exactly how the graveyard moved from an early 17th-century free graveyard to a late 18th century slave one remains another lost element of the tragic story of Manhattan’s African Burial Ground. Exactly how the graveyard moved from being a graveyard to a heavily developed metropolitan block is another lost element, which weighs heavily on the mind.

That missing piece of the puzzle is what always bothered me about this metropolitan graveyard. It’s not just the brutality, the unfree existence and unpeaceful and unequal eternal rest. What stays with me is how a graveyard spanning six acres becomes paved-over to begin with, and how it can remain undiscovered until the 1990s. It is the epitome of cruel neglect, allowing property to pass from public to private, allowing grave markers to rot, and paving over thousands of final resting places in deliberate ignorance. To turn a land from a cemetery to parking lots there had to have been, at some point in New York’s history, a decision from its people to let the dead who built their city be paved over and to desecrate their final resting place.

For the graveyard to remain unacknowledged and unrecorded for so much of New York’s history speaks volumes. No one who could write, who could record this fact, chose to do so. Those at the time who knew of the graveyard’s defilement, who had family, friends or ancestors in that graveyard, didn’t have the power to record their sorrow or outrage. There is virtually nothing to study by way of eyewitness history at the African Burial Ground, because there is no living record of the men and women who must have watched in pain as the final resting place of their families, friends and community members was obliterated and eventually turned into a city block. It speaks of a city and culture that simply didn’t care about the deaths of enslaved African men and women, or of the free ones of the same ethnicity. But what an unspeakable horror of neglect it is, regardless of how these men and women may have been viewed while alive, that their graveyard would be so purposefully forgotten.

At best guess, there are still potentially thousands of undiscovered graves in Downtown Manhattan. If a mind-blowing 419 bodies could be exhumed from just one corner of a city block, and the graveyard originally spanned six acres, with an estimated 15,000 burials, one can only imagine how many more men and women are lying under Manhattan’s skyscrapers, pedestrian walkways, maintenance lines, and subway tunnels. It’s an uneasy, unpleasant and frankly unavoidable truth that if you have walked through Downtown Manhattan, you have almost certainly walked over the bodies of the dead, including former slaves, impoverished colonial paupers dumped into mass graves, and the ancient resting places of the Lenape. But it’s especially unnerving and sounds horrifyingly fabricated, to think that Manhattan is a city so deeply entrenched in the darkest parts of the Atlantic Slave Trade’s history, that there are actually skeletons of slaves under its sidewalks.

As cold comfort, one could argue that we are always walking on the dead. Tens of thousands of years of human existence and burial, and hundreds of generations of indigenous tribes living and surviving and dying on the land we now live on, has made it impossible not to consider the possibility. Theoretically, there could be countless remains under all of our feet, many of them already thousand-year-old dust. But Manhattan’s slave graves are undeniably different. For one, they aren’t theoretical graves, hundreds of feet underground. They are carefully buried, facing east, and when a small fraction were discovered at the corner of Elk and Duane street, they were less than 60 feet below the sidewalk. There is also the unavoidable fact that for these men and women, walking above their graves feels especially heinous because of the pain and humiliation they experienced while alive. Howard University’s research study found that almost every skeleton they exhumed suffered from extreme nutrient deficiency (Blankey and Rankin-Hill, 102), and most had visible chemical signatures on their teeth, which displayed years of stress, poor diet, and overexertion (Blankey and Rankin-Hill 97). Perhaps most importantly, isotope decay and burial rites suggested that a majority of the bodies in the graves were very likely born, and died, in bonds (103). Their presence under the ground in Downtown Manhattan is the result of a culture that enslaved and ultimately killed them, and then paved over their graves to make way for metropolitan success. It inflicted upon them a decidedly unfree and unjust treatment in death, after an unfree and unjust life.

But what Julius fails to mention in his thoughts in Open City is the unavoidableness of the entire situation, the final nail in a coffin of unease. Although Manhattan may be laying on a graveyard, the real horror is that there is almost nothing to be done about it. The evil deed is done. The graveyard has already been paved over, developed on top of, and even if the entire city united to try to exhume and relocate the bodies, there is simply too much concrete, landfill, and mass-development to entertain the possibility of locating every slave body under the soil. Even intact bodies, not crushed under the weight of skyscraper foundations or destroyed by dynamite and drills during the construction of subway tunnels, will likely never be found. They will remain under Manhattan’s surface, a lingering stain on its conscience, a permanent reminder of its dark past, until Manhattan itself crumbles and falls.

 (c. 1250)

Works Cited

Blankey, Michael L., and Lesley M. Rankin-Hill, editors. The New York African Burial Ground: Unearthing the African Presence in Colonial New York . Howard UP, in association with US General Services Administration, 2009, www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/upload/downVol1-Part1-The-Skeletal-Biology-of-th e-NYAGB.pdf/.

Cole, Teju. Open City. Random House, 2012.

New York: African Burial Ground National Monument (U.S. National Park Service), www.nps.gov/articles/afamburial.htm. Accessed 12 Dec. 2020.