The basement was neat and clean considering we were under the church. There were three openings that led underneath separate parts of the building. The entrance to one of them was covered with an iron fire door that led beneath an addition that was built after a fire in the 1920s. Another was blocked by fallen debris and construction material, making it impossible to go inside; but the third opening was unobstructed. Lois switched on a light and I could see the brick pillars that held up the foundation. The dirt floor was strewn with rocks but there was plenty of room to hide.
“One day, the workmen for Con Edison discovered a tunnel under the street next to the church, but they filled it in before we were called.” Lois’s stricken face mirrored my own. “It was unfortunate. It could have given us valuable information.”
Knowing history, and having a physical place to connect it to, is a magical combination. It binds you to that place in time in a way books and films on their own can never do. To be where a momentous event happened, to sit were Lincoln sat, to walk were Harriet Tubman walked, brings the past present, so that for a moment their pain and sacrifice, victories and losses, are yours. Their mistakes are ours not to repeat, and their triumphs to advance upon. It’s why the Holocaust Memorial Museum keeps the shoes from the concentration camps, why we mark where George Washington slept, and why I asked to stand where a slave girl named Pinky once stood. Keeping these artifacts and preserving these places honors our past and is essential to our future.
After I left Plymouth Church, I walked through Brooklyn Heights on streets named after some of the earliest Dutch and English settlers — Hicks, Remsen, Boerum — landowners who made their fortunes in no small part from the efforts of slave labor. The homes are beautiful, pristine, like the homes on Duffield Street once were. Brooklyn Heights is a historic district, with well-documented evidence of its past. It is where, during the revolutionary war, George Washington and his men fought the British and where homes stood through which Harriet Tubman scuttled fugitive slaves to safety during the Civil War. Washington and Tubman couldn’t be more different, and yet their defiant spirit, their determination to do what needed to be done against a formidable enemy, is a large part of what Brooklyn is made of.
“May I have your attention, please?” said a young man who looked like he had just begun shaving that morning. I was on the train headed for Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I don’t mean to disturb you, but I’m selling candy this morning.” I buried my face in my newspaper. Others busied themselves with electronic devices or fiddled inside their purses. “And I’m not selling them for a basketball team or for a school. I’m selling them for myself. Me,” he said tenaciously. I looked up from my paper. I hadn’t heard this one before. “And I plan on spending my money wisely and in a responsible manner. Thank you.”
As our train pulled into the Utica Avenue station, an older gentleman, a black Muslim dressed in a long white tunic, called the kid over. “I don’t want the candy,” he said. “Take the dollar.” He shoved the money into the kid’s hand with as much cockiness as the kid had shown delivering his speech. Such a display of industriousness and pluck was a perfect introduction to my next destination.
African American historical landmarks are disappearing at an alarming rate. Too often what is left can only be imagined, but sometimes we get lucky. Weeksville was one of the earliest free African American communities, the center of intellectual, cultural, and economic life in Brooklyn. At its peak during the 1860s and ’70s, five hundred to seven hundred prosperous African American families lived there. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the first female African American doctor in New York State, and Moses P. Cobb, Brooklyn’s first black policeman, were among them. Some of the homes and churches were key stops on the Underground Railroad, undocumented of course; and there were at least two forgotten newspapers, the Freedman’s Torchlight and the People’s Journal. But despite that history, the four remaining structures of Weeksville had been scheduled to be torn down in 1968 in order to build more housing projects. Thankfully, they were saved by the efforts of James Hurley and Joseph Haynes, an historian and an amateur pilot, armed with an old map and a plane. They flew over the area and spotted an unfamiliar lane and several dilapidated homes partially hidden by overgrown weeds.
Hunterfly Road, which looks like a wide dirt path, runs diagonal to one of the modern streets. I entered the gate and found four perfectly restored pre — Civil War wood frames that look as if they were out of Colonial Williamsburg. The Hunterfly Road Houses, as they are now called, are surrounded by the Kingsborough projects, condos, and single-family homes built later in the twentieth century. They tower over the Weeksville Heritage Center like invading alien ships.
Like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes, these houses have small rooms, box-shaped, with low ceilings and narrow staircases that can only accommodate one person going up or down at a time. Architects working for the Center have discovered that two of the homes were built in the same style as Southern slave quarters. Inside, the rooms are sparsely furnished; the Heritage Center needs more funds.
I came armed with a list of questions, the answers to most of which could only be speculated upon. The town of Weeksville is where victims of the Draft Riots escaped to in 1863. Hundreds of blacks from Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn took refuge here from white mobs who lynched, burned, and beat them because they were angry about being drafted into the Civil War.
“We don’t know if anyone came to these particular homes,” Lauren Rhodes, the educational coordinator and guide, told me, “but there’s a good chance that they did.” The local celebrities back then, Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, Moses P. Cobb, and Junius C. Morel, a journalist and principal of Colored School No. 2, lived in Weeksville, but their homes as well as the school are now gone. The African Civilization Society met somewhere in Weeksville, and the Garnet Field Club practiced baseball in a field, somewhere. The Brooklyn Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, which took in homeless children and those fresh from slavery, now belongs to a repair shop for the New York City Transit Authority.
Thanks to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s online archives, I know that Harriet Tubman spoke in Weeksville, as did Fredrick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Elizabeth Keckly had a correspondence with Fredrick Douglass, and when she retired she taught at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the same place that Susan Smith McKinney-Steward worked after her retirement. At some time during her stay in New York, Keckly probably visited Weeksville, but I can only guess, since all that remains of the place is four little houses and a few churches scattered inside of what used to be its boundaries.
I was ready to work on the play, and though I didn’t find a lot of what I was looking for, I had a sense of what a woman like Keckly experienced in 1860 New York. Hope and fear is what African Americans were living with back then. Hope for a better life, and fear that the outcome of the Civil War would throw them back into slavery. On that the evidence is pretty clear. How wonderful it would be to see more of the places in which their dreams and struggles took place. Back at Plymouth Church, I had asked Lois Rosebrooks why white people tend not to think of black history as their own history. The minute the question came out of my mouth, I wanted to take it back. It seemed a rude thing to ask of a woman who has devoted much of her life to preserving African American history. I could tell she was taken aback by my question but thankfully not offended. “People are bored by history,” she said. “They don’t want to know it, black or white. I don’t know,” she continued, “I’d have to think more on that.”