From where I stood, I could see, behind the diner, the massive ATT Long Lines building on Church Street. It was a windowless tower, a giant concrete slab rising into the sky, with little more than a few ventilation openings, which resembled periscopes, to indicate that this was a building rather than a dense brick fabricated by a gargantuan machine. Each floor was at least double the height of that found in a normal office building, so that the whole tower, intimidating though it was, came to only twenty-nine stories. The military aspect of the Long Lines building was intensified by the thickened corners, elongated shafts with which the building mimicked the form of a castle’s keep flanked by gatehouse towers, and which concealed the elevators, ductwork, and plumbing. Those few workers who used the building, I imagined, must after a few years become moles, their circadian rhythms completely distorted, their skin de-pigmented to the point of transparency. Long Lines, which I continued to stare at, as though it had drawn me into a trance, seemed like nothing so much as a monument or a stele.
I was drawn out of my thoughts by the voice of a security officer: You can’t stand here, move along, sir. I moved, and came down to the side street. The line had extended that far, to the distant edge of the building. Nearby, another man, who seemed to be a janitor, was helping a Hispanic family group, a mother and two children, who seemed to be lost. Trying to understand what they were asking for, he repeated the mother’s pronunciation of passport as passiport. The older of her boys was just beginning to sprout his first unruly facial hairs. He looked bored, or perhaps embarrassed. Near the front of the line, a young woman raced out of the glass doors, and threw herself at a waiting group, hugging them and weeping. A young man, perhaps her husband, had come out with her, and the people they met outside beamed, embraced each other, and exchanged high fives. An older woman in the group began to weep, and the young woman said, loud enough for all to hear: Now you see who I get it from, from my mama. The other people in line, wishing the same good luck for themselves, possibly made even more tense by someone else’s demonstration of relief, perhaps discomfited by the emotionalism, watched and looked away, and watched again. The janitor near me smiled, shook his head, and explained to the Hispanic family how to get to the passport office.
There was a small security island in the middle of the side street, and just across from it, surrounded by the huge office buildings, was a patch of grass. It wouldn’t have drawn my attention at all, if I hadn’t seen a curious shape — sculpture or architecture, I couldn’t tell right away — set into the middle of it. An inscription on the monument, for that is what it turned out to be, identified it as a memorial for the site of an African burial ground. 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. It had passed into private and civic ownership. The monument I saw was designed by a Haitian artist, but I was unable to take a closer look, because it was closed to public access, for renovation, as a sign informed me, in preparation for the summer tourism season. In the green grass and bright sun, in the shadow of government and the marketplace, standing a few yards from the cordoned-off monument, I had no purchase on who these people were whose corpses, between the 1690s and 1795, had been laid to rest beneath my feet. It was here, on the outskirts of the city at the time, north of Wall Street and so outside civilization as it was then defined, that blacks were allowed to bury their dead. Then the dead returned when, in 1991, construction of a building on Broadway and Duane brought human remains to the surface. They had been buried in white shrouds. The coffins that were discovered, some four hundred of them, were almost all found to have been oriented toward the east.
The squabble about the construction of the monument did not interest me. There was certainly no chance that six acres of prime real estate in lower Manhattan would be razed and rededicated as holy ground. What I was steeped in, on that warm morning, was the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York. At the Negro Burial Ground, as it was then known, and others like it on the eastern seaboard, excavated bodies bore traces of suffering: blunt trauma, grievous bodily harm. Many of the skeletons had broken bones, evidence of the suffering they’d endured in life. Disease was common, too: syphilis, rickets, arthritis. In some of the palls were found shells, beads, and polished stones, and in these scholars had seen hints of African religions, rites perhaps retained from the Congo, or from along the West African coast, from which so many people had been captured and sold into slavery. One body had been found buried in a British marine officer’s uniform. Some others had been found with coins over their eyes.
There had been, in the 1780s, a petition by free blacks in defense of their dead. Black corpses were frequently singled out by cadaver thieves, who passed them on to surgeons and anatomists. The petition, in palpably pained language, laments those who under cover of night “dig up the bodies of the deceased, friends and relatives of the petitioners, carry them away without respect to age or sex, mangle their flesh out of wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds.” The civil powers recognized the justness of the cause and, in 1789, the New York Anatomy Act was passed. From that time forward, as was done in Europe, the needs of surgical anatomy were to be met by the cadavers of executed murderers, arsonists, and burglars. The Act added, to the sentence of death for criminals, the further retribution of the medical profession; and it left the buried bodies of innocent blacks in peace and neglect. How difficult it was, from the point of view of the twenty-first century, to fully believe that these people, with the difficult lives they were forced to live, were truly people, complex in all their dimensions as we are, fond of pleasures, shy of suffering, attached to their families. How many times, in the course of each of these lives, would death have invaded, carrying off a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a child, a cousin, a lover? And yet, the Negro Burial Ground was no mass grave: each body had been buried singly, according to whichever rite it was that, outside the city walls, the blacks had been at liberty to practice.
The security island near the monument was unmanned. I stepped across the cordon, and into the grassy plot. Bending down, I lifted a stone from the grass and, as I did so, a pain shot through the back of my left hand.
NINETEEN
I needed clothes for the ceremonies of my father’s burial in May 1989. As these things, and many other simple tasks, confused my mother in those days, most of the rites and the practical matters were taken care of by my father’s sister, my aunt Tinu. A few weeks before the burial, she took me to a tailor’s shop in Ajegunle, a sprawling slum of rusted roofs and open sewers, where the children were all poor and some of them were visibly malnourished. These children stared when my aunt and I emerged from her car because, from their point of view, we would have represented unimaginable wealth and privilege, an impression strengthened by my “whiteness.” The shop itself had an efficient air; its interior, lit only by natural light, was clean, and redolent of blue chalk. There were swatches of Dutch wax prints on the floor, semimatte squares of loud color that interrupted the gray shine of the concrete, and the tailor flattered me as he took measurements with his swiftly unfurled tape measure, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to congratulate someone on the length of his inseam or the breadth of his shoulders. He was perhaps trying to comfort me, having had a quiet word beforehand with my aunt, who had told him the purpose of our visit. He called out mysterious numbers to his assistant, numbers that would later be transmuted into clothing, a white shirt and dark suit for the burial, a buba and sokoto in indigo-dyed, hand-spun cloth for the funeral after-party.