|
||||
|
|
|
||
|
||||
The Series
Day 1, Sunday, March 12
Buying and Selling the Human Species: Newport and the Slave Trade
For more than 75 years, the Triangular Trade flourishes in Newport. Rhode Island rum is traded in Africa for slaves, many of whom are sold in the West Indies. Molasses is brought back to Newport so distillers can make more rum.
Day 2, Monday, March 13
Plantations in the North: The Narragansett Planters
The prosperous Narragansett Planters, operating plantations in South County, send food and livestock vital to the huge sugar cane plantations in the West Indies.
Day 3, Tuesday, March 14
Strangers in a Strange Land: Newport's Slaves
Newport slaves left few accounts to convey what they thought or how they felt.
Day 4, Wednesday, March 15
1 Boye Slave Dyed: The Terrible Voyage of the Sally
As Capt. Esek Hopkins found at the height of the trade, transporting slaves was dangerous and dirty work. The Brown brothers' first joint investment in a slave voyage is a financial disaster.
Day 5, Thursday, March 16
Brown vs. Brown: Brothers Go Head to Head
Providence brothers John and Moses Brown, one a slave trader and the other an abolitionist, square off.
Day 6, Friday, March 17
Living Off the Trade: Bristol and the DeWolfs
Although federal and state laws are passed to end slave trading, merchants find ways to evade them and continue to prosper. The DeWolfs of Bristol dominate the slave trade and the town.
Day 7, Sunday, March 19
When Kristin Hayes teaches slavery, she shows her students a colorful mural depicting a white man on a horse overseeing bare-chested slaves toiling in a field.
Tuesday, Mar. 14, 2006
On a hill where rows of gravestones lean left and right, and where angels spread their wings atop broken slate, Theresa Guzman Stokes is recovering the past.
Some 282 Africans and African-Americans are buried here in Newport, in one of the largest and oldest slave cemeteries in the country.
Stokes hopes to tell their stories in a new book about the burial ground, God's Little Acre.
So far, she's found information - some of it sketchy - on 85 slaves and free blacks.
"Eventually, I want to trace everyone who is here," she says. "I have this crazy fear that if someone doesn't document this, it will all disappear one day."
Among those memorialized are several slaves who won their freedom, including Charity "Duchess" Quamino, a pastry chef honored for her intelligence and industry, and Pompey Brenton, a black leader and caterer.
"I keep thinking back to what my father told me," says Stokes. "If they know your name, you're immortal."
Stokes first became involved in preserving the cemetery 22 years ago. Driving home from her Navy job, she noticed missing and toppled stones on the hill above Farewell Street.
"I'm not sure anyone was aware of its significance then," says Stokes, now a publisher and Web designer. "The response from most people was, `Oh yeah, that's where they buried the slaves."'
Stokes and black leader Rowena Stewart convinced city workers to use weed whackers around the fragile grave stones, which had been smashed by the city's big lawn mowers. But Stokes didn't stop there.
A few years ago she created a Web site for the cemetery, www.colonialcemetery.com. And last year, she and her husband, Keith, unveiled a 10-foot-tall wooden sign at the cemetery's Farewell Street entrance. An artist added a West African proverb: "Life is a shadow and a mist; it passes quickly by, and is no more."
Her new book - named 5 Years and 2 Months: Slave Markers of Colonial Newport - will include dozens of photographs by Tiverton landscape photographer Randy Santerre.
Santerre's pictures, says Stokes, will help preserve the names, dates and headstone art which have been worn down - and in some cases erased - by wind, rain and neglect.
Before the book, she plans to put together a walking tour of the cemetery.
Although rows of stones are now separated by barren patches, Theresa says her mother-in-law remembers a time "when you couldn't walk a straight line" without touching a headstone.
The headstones reveal much about slavery in Newport. Some slaves were buried under their African names, such as Cuffe, Mimbo and Quamino. Some headstones have cherubs with curly hair and other African features. Some ornate carvings rival those of their white owners.
All suggests that Newport slaves had a greater status than those in the South and the Caribbean, and that African culture was tolerated to some extent by the white community, says Keith Stokes.
"These are not just ghosts or slaves, but men, women and children with identities, needs, wants and accomplishments," says Keith. "I tell African-American kids on my walking tours that many of Newport's Colonists looked like them. That shocks them," he says.
The city's slavery past has not always been so well known. In the past, officials have often focused on the colony's white founders, the America's Cup races and the Gilded Age mansions of the very rich.
But last summer, Stokes worked with local tour guides and docents to integrate the town's slavery past into walking tours and talks offered by the Touro Synagogue and the Newport Historical Society. And the slave trade is part of the historical society's exhibit at Brick Market Place.
"It's an untold story for many people," says Richard C. Youngken of Newport, who has written a history of blacks in Newport.
Youngken and Keith Stokes are part of a group trying to make Newport a World Heritage attraction. Slavery and Newport's African past will be part of the city's application to the United Nations, which has awarded the designation to 812 sites around the world.
Theresa Stokes isn't trying to reach U.N. officials, scholars or politicians.
A former teacher, she hopes her book will inspire black children who are unaware of Newport's rich African past.
"Slavery is always going to be such a negative issue that it's hard to talk about it," she says. But a number of African men and women survived the harsh reality and made important contributions to the Colony's beginnings, she says.
