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The truth is often hiding in plain sight.
Not until the shutdown during the pandemic did I even notice the farmhouse in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, nestled behind shrubbery, trees, and wrought iron fencing. It was home to the Lefferts family, descendants of the Dutch settlers who had first arrived in 1624 in what would become New York.
In late 2020, the landmark plaque presented a fairly innocuous narrative about the house, noting, that both “indentured white[s] and enslaved black[s]” built it and worked on the surrounding land. For the average passerby, the blurbs offered a chronology centered on settlement, conquest, and innovations in farming. For the discerning viewer, they were a mere summary of how Lenape lands were seized by Dutch colonists then British colonists, flattening the weight and presence of history at their feet.
But a recent exhibit, Trace/s: Family History Research and the Legacy of Slavery in Brooklyn, underscores just how incomplete the record remains, and how it fails to account for the lives and humanity of the formerly enslaved.
The modest exhibition, at the Center for Brooklyn History through August, contains 10 archival documents: bills of sales, journals, manumissions, newspaper clippings, photographs and ledgers. These items are paired with striking oil portraits of two representative members of Brooklyn families whose legacies are inextricably bounded together by slavery: John A Lott and Mildred Jones, a Brooklyn-born descendant of Samuel Anderson, who was enslaved by the Lott family.
Trace/s asks its viewers to examine the archive and to face unsettling truths about the United States, as well as to upend dominant and simplistic narratives about the voracity of antislavery forces of the industrial north, namely New York City’s history with centuries of enslavement.
The Lefferts House, preserved for posterity and listed in the US registry of historic places, once occupied the present-day intersection of Maple Street and Flatbush Avenue, and was moved to its permanent home in Prospect Park in 1918. At one point as many as 25 enslaved persons toiled the farmland during the era of the house’s construction from 1783 to 1827, the year that New York state formally abolished slavery.
New York’s emancipation history was fraught with the demands of enslavers, who claimed that freedom for enslaved people was at odds with a 1799 law that facilitated gradual emancipation for certain enslaved children and promised their forced labor until their mid-20s. In practice, emancipation for the “formerly” enslaved in 1827 New York didn’t materially change their lot. Many remained in servitude through the 1830s and 1840s in the Brooklyn areas known today as Flatbush and Flatlands.
Along with their southern counterparts, the planter class of wealthy families of Brooklyn profited greatly from slavery and built generational wealth through exploitation. Slave-owning families constituted 40% of Brooklyn households. As their wealth accrued, they consolidated civic and social power, and their names are known today because they are emblazoned on street signs and subway stops, landmarks and monuments throughout Brooklyn: Bergen, Nostrand, Stuyvesant, Vanderbilt, Van Brunt. To continue to describe the colonial era lands of Brooklyn as “farmland”, as the exhibit does, obfuscates the full story of New York City’s history and relationship to slavery. In the colonial era and throughout the 19th century, Brooklyn’s farmland was the second-largest producer of food for the rapidly expanding city. These farms were plantations.
The evidence of enslaved Black people’s existence and subjugation – usually their names – are almost always found in the records white people kept. But what does one make of the absence of evidence? One of the documents on view includes Lefferts family papers of an 1814 bill of sale of Mercy, a nine-year-old girl. She was sold by Phebe Lefferts to Abraham Vanderveer, and the documents included a notable stipulation of the conditions of her servitude. Mercy would be taught to read and write, as well as have “sufficient meat and drink, washing, lodging, and apparel” until she turned 18. The magistrate was also instructed to add that Mercy should “behave herself”.
These caveats outlined in the sale require discernment from historians and archivists to telegraph to viewers the intimate nature of relationships between enslavers and the enslaved. Could Mercy have been the child of the enslaver? With New York’s incremental moves toward abolition, was it Phebe Lefferts’ intention to ensure that Mercy was cared for under the servitude of her new enslaver? To insist, for instance, that an enslaved child was to be taught to read and write, which was illegal, might suggest as much. What happened to Mercy after the sale, especially when she turned 18 in 1832, five years after New York State abolition law took effect, remains unknown.
Trace/s tries to address the absence of the enslaved and their stories within the archive through newspaper clippings from one of the largest local papers of the time, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An 1898 profile of Samuel Anderson, under the headline, Born A Slave in Flatbush: Uncle Sammy’s Reminiscences of Slavery Days, aims to give the formerly enslaved some voice and agency. Still, the story of Anderson, who was 88 at the time of publication, was filtered through the lens of whiteness.
While a remarkable document, the article is an example of what Toni Morrison wrote about in The Site of Memory, when, in slave narratives, the authors censor and shield the reader from the brutality of their bondage, saying: “Let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.” Morrison adds: “In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things.” The exhibit elucidates this reality.
Trace/s acknowledges the decades-long efforts of local activists and historians who have been working to recover the record of the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Groups such as the Afro American Historical and Genealogical Society, formed in 1977, have sought to address the complications of the traditional archives, underscoring how racism’s long reach impedes this kind of research for Black Americans.
In her 1882 book, The Social History of Flatbush, and Manners and Customs of the Dutch Settlers in Kings County, Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt bemoaned the erasure of Dutch influences in a rapidly modernizing Brooklyn at the end of the 19th century, writing, “Nearly every trace of Dutch descent has been swept away; there only remain the reminiscences and traditions, while the old family names mark the localities still, as the projecting peaks mark the submerged rock. All that relates to home and kindred has its interest, especially when we know that the home is soon to be broken up and the ties of kindred sundered.”
Vanderbilt’s lament in this volume seems melodramatic. Twenty-first century Brooklyn’s streets and neighborhoods are imprinted with the names of the settlers and their descendants, with busts and plaques aplomb to honor and acknowledge their lives. The evidence of their existence is everywhere. Their final resting place at the Flatbush Reformed Dutch church cemetery, at the intersection of Church and Flatbush, is preserved to this day.
That fact stands in stark contrast to untold hundreds of formerly enslaved and free Blacks who walked the roads and paths of pre-civil war Brooklyn. In 2021, a grassroots campaign sought to draw attention to this history legacy hidden in plain sight by the residents of neighborhoods in Bedford Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Flatbush. When excavation for a new housing development began, a burial ground for enslaved Africans was uncovered. Local groups pushed city officials to pause construction and later secured a $4m commitment from New York City’s parks department for a memorial in 2022. But it’s unclear when those plans will be implemented.
This is the powerful mark that Trace/s impresses upon its viewers. It is a call to all descendants to look backward in order to move forward.
