Richmond’s long-forgotten Shockoe Hill African Burying Floor, which McQueen dropped at gentle, is adjoining to 2 well-preserved cemeteries for White individuals, together with former U.S. Supreme Court docket chief justice John Marshall and Accomplice veterans. However the African burying floor is invisible beneath an deserted gasoline station, freeway overpasses and railroad tracks.
“No one might see it,” mentioned Ana Edwards, an activist who has spent years elevating Richmond’s Black historical past. “It was merely shoveled underneath roadways and scraped apart to make room for bridges. There was no respect. That actually hurts, however there’s additionally anger.”
Historians now imagine Shockoe Hill could possibly be the biggest cemetery without spending a dime and enslaved Africans within the nation, eclipsing New York Metropolis’s African Burial Ground National Monument.
McQueen set a precedent this summer time by working with consultants to get the Shockoe Hill burying floor onto the National Register of Historic Places. It was honored not just for a historical past relationship to 1816 however for the systematic effort to erase Black heritage that passed off there — opening the door for different desecrated landmarks to be acknowledged.
However the threats proceed. Plans for a brand new Richmond-to-D.C. rail line are set to additional injury the burying floor. McQueen and different advocates are scrambling to push the Federal Railroad Administration to gradual the method and reroute the tracks.
“So many issues have been finished to this, however it’s nonetheless a burial floor,” McQueen mentioned on a latest go to to Richmond. She walked alongside Hospital Road, minimize by way of the cemetery greater than a century in the past. Vehicles thunked throughout the Interstate 64 bridges overhead; sweet wrappers, beer cans and plastic foam meals containers littered the weeds alongside the sidewalk.
“I simply bear in mind seeing this for the primary time and considering I have to be within the fallacious place,” she mentioned. “However I wasn’t.”
McQueen’s work suggests the breadth of historical past underfoot in a spot reminiscent of Richmond, an outdated metropolis that had lengthy saved a jealous focus on Accomplice statues and monuments.
But it surely additionally exhibits the ability of the best of private tales. As a result of McQueen, an newbie historian pushed by unusual perseverance, has cracked open the previous with just a few fragile instruments.
McQueen, a trainer initially from New Jersey, obtained interested by family tree by way of a cousin in Charlottesville. It was presupposed to be a quiet passion. She is a particularly personal particular person — don’t attempt asking her age — however had lengthy been curious when relations instructed tales of being related to Thomas Jefferson and Monticello.
Whereas that hasn’t been confirmed, the cousin related McQueen with an area genealogist who discovered hyperlinks to a different close by plantation known as Morven. Slowly, McQueen’s reserve was overtaken by a compulsion to analysis and examine.
In 2001, billionaire John Kluge donated almost 7,400 acres, together with Morven Farm, to the College of Virginia. When he died in 2009, the information prodded McQueen to name the college and ask if anybody had been researching the plantation’s enslaved group. She wound up speaking with historical past professor Scot French.
McQueen is a persistent emailer and telephone caller, and she or he and French shortly fashioned a long-distance partnership. She helped mentor a small group of scholars of their analysis about Morven, French mentioned in an interview, guiding them as a descendant and compiling a database of all their findings.
“She isn’t an educational, however she actually brings an educational’s rigor to the analysis that she does,” mentioned French, who now teaches on the College of Central Florida however this 12 months resumed a particular course at Morven with McQueen. “She’s moved in a extremely highly effective method by the necessity to do this sort of work.”
His college students positioned a list of property from the desire of early Morven proprietor David Higginbotham, who died in 1853; it named 56 enslaved individuals. French thought the listing was of restricted worth — it gave solely first names.
However McQueen’s eye caught one thing the category had missed: the identify Kitty Cary. The scholars had taken that as a double identify, like Mary Sue, however McQueen acknowledged Cary as a surname in her household historical past. Different paperwork established that she was McQueen’s fourth-great-grandmother.
“Possibly that’s the rationale I really feel particularly related to her,” McQueen mentioned, “as a result of she was my discovery.”
Time teased out small particulars of Cary’s life. She was born within the 1790s. She had a number of youngsters and belonged to a church. The Higginbotham daughters referred to her affectionately in letters — she might need been concerned in elevating them, probably lived with them in the principle home. One doc indicated that when David Higginbotham died, Cary was paid to assist compile the stock — apparently the one enslaved particular person given such a job.
After Higginbotham’s demise, the household offered the farm and auctioned off the enslaved staff. His spouse moved away. As of 2010, that was all McQueen might study.
“I used to be left with a cliffhanger,” McQueen mentioned, “besides that the proprietor’s widow indicated to her daughter that she would preserve Kitty.”
Additional analysis confirmed that the widow relocated to Richmond. “I knew … I wanted to go to Richmond to attempt to discover her,” McQueen mentioned.
In 2017, McQueen was invited to U-Va. for a convention on descendants of the enslaved.
Arriving early, she drove to workplaces of the Virginia Historic Society in Richmond to see the Higginbotham household papers. It was a mountain of fabric. However as she picked up one doc, a phrase jumped out at her: Kitty.
Elizabeth Higginbotham Fisher, daughter of the plantation’s late proprietor, was writing from Richmond in 1857 to her sister in Philadelphia about her grief over Cary’s demise.
“It was a really lovely letter. It made me cry,” mentioned McQueen, who speaks quietly and betrays little emotion in public.
“Our pricey, devoted, outdated Kitty is [no] extra,” Elizabeth Fisher wrote, in response to McQueen’s transcription of the letter.
Simply after 5 that morning, the letter mentioned, phrase had come that Cary was dying. Fisher ran downstairs solely partly dressed. Cary’s youngsters gathered bedside as she mentioned her remaining phrases, “Don’t cry youngsters, don’t cry for me, I’m going dwelling.”
The scene “has so fully unhinged me that I’m unfit for any factor,” Fisher wrote. “I staid there and had her neatly ready for the tomb — it was what she would have finished for me.” She added that “I intend following her physique to the grave tomorrow afternoon.”
Right here was a uncooked glimpse of the difficult racial relationships of the day, and a much more intimate connection to her ancestor than McQueen had dared hope to search out. It additionally supplied a clue: Cary’s remaining resting place was close to the household’s downtown dwelling.
McQueen’s elation took an unsightly flip the subsequent day. One of many matters at her U-Va. symposium was the follow of grave-robbing that plagued Richmond throughout the 1800s. So-called resurrectionists dug up corpses for dissection within the medical colleges in Richmond and Charlottesville — primarily from Black burial grounds.
“It was an terrible, horrifying feeling,” McQueen mentioned, to assume that her ancestor might need been violated.
Richmond’s most well-known African burying floor was downtown, close to the South’s second-busiest slave market after New Orleans. Paved over and partly destroyed by the freeway within the Nineteen Fifties, that web site is now coated with grass and put aside as a spot for reflection. For almost twenty years, the Sacred Floor Historic Reclamation Undertaking — led by Edwards — has been urging the town to do more to commemorate it.
When Cary died in 1857, although, that cemetery was closed. McQueen’s analysis confirmed that the town established three new burying grounds alongside its northern boundary in 1816 — one for White Christians, one for Jews and one other for Black individuals, free and enslaved.
The third one needed to be the place. Earlier than visiting it, McQueen stopped at Fisher’s grave in Richmond’s marquee burial floor, Hollywood Cemetery, established barely later than those she had been researching.
The Higginbotham and Fisher headstones stand in a clearing atop a hill surrounded by magnolia and holly bushes. McQueen marveled on the setting — the James River far under, {couples} and schoolchildren strolling previous elaborate grave markers telling of so many lives.
The following day she went to search out Kitty Cary’s cemetery. She drove down the hill beneath the freeway to railroad tracks and a sewage-treatment plant. She drove again up. Nothing however an deserted gasoline station and a low concrete constructing. She drove again down.
Lastly, it dawned on her: This was it. This was the African burying floor.
Fueled by a way of concern, McQueen determined to research. She researched outdated deeds, maps and information clippings and found that the burying floor had grown to 31 acres earlier than being shut down in 1879. Metropolis data prompt not less than 22,000 burials. New York’s African burial floor is assumed to include stays of about 15,000 individuals.
Starting within the Reconstruction period, the Richmond burying floor was systematically erased — first from view, then from reminiscence. Highway staff dug up graves within the Eighteen Eighties and, regardless of warnings from the town council, used the bones as fill materials, in response to modern information accounts discovered by McQueen and archaeologist Steve Thompson.
A couple of years later, the highest of the burying floor was regraded for building of a bridge, exposing extra graves. Black newspaper writer John Mitchell Jr. mourned “the hearts of the surviving households made to bleed by the desecration of the stays of their family members.”
Railroads carved by way of the underside of the hill round 1900, and by the Sixties the freeway and a gasoline station had obliterated any lingering trace of the location’s former use. A 2013 Virginia Division of Transportation report on widening that part of freeway prompt no historic sources could be broken by the challenge.
Working from Texas and overcoming a concern of the limelight, McQueen has marshaled a military of supporters to combat again. She helped the D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation make a video concerning the web site.
In 2018, McQueen found that the now-abandoned gasoline station was on an inventory of tax delinquent properties to be offered at public sale. She hounded the town of Richmond to purchase it (which it did, for $160,000), whipped up a marketing campaign for a state historic marker and labored with historians to hunt Nationwide Historic standing.
“Within the historical past of this division, in all of the properties we now have listed, we now have by no means had a single nomination [for a historical marker] obtain so many letters of help,” mentioned Julie Langan, director of the Virginia Division of Historic Assets.
The marketing campaign for nationwide standing was the longest shot. The Nationwide Register often judges websites on how intact or undisturbed they’re. On this case, the applying argued that the African burying floor deserved to be included partially as a result of Richmond has systematically obliterated it over the previous 140 years — signifying a special sort of historical past.
Its profitable itemizing will “definitely open up the potential for placing many extra African American cemeteries on the registry,” mentioned Michael Blakey, a professor on the Faculty of William and Mary who did trailblazing work on the New York burial web site.
The designation has additionally helped McQueen and different supporters gradual the method for approving building of a brand new high-speed practice route between Richmond and D.C., which is about to chop yet one more scar throughout the bones of individuals’s ancestors.
The Federal Railroad Administration “totally acknowledges the cultural and historic significance of the Shockoe Hill African Burying Grounds,” a spokesman for the company mentioned by way of e-mail, including that regulators will work with stakeholders in a evaluate course of that would take years.
Regardless of all the destruction, parts of the cemetery stay. A latest preliminary survey with ground-penetrating radar discovered proof of a number of graves, mentioned Kimberly Chen of the Richmond planning workplace.
Much more outstanding are the cultural traces. Historian Ryan Okay. Smith of Virginia Commonwealth College, who maintains a web site on Richmond cemeteries, factors to a strong scene within the works of Frederick Regulation Olmsted — the well-known panorama architect who traveled the South earlier than the Civil Warfare to watch slavery.
Olmsted writes of visiting Richmond in 1853 and coming upon a “negro funeral.” His description matches the Shockoe Hill African Burying Floor — a “desolate place” simply past the town’s principal cemetery, which against this is “properly crammed with monuments and evergreens.”
About 50 Black mourners comply with a horse-drawn hearse, with six coaches and 6 “well-dressed males” on horseback. They cease close to the contemporary grave of a kid; one other grave is open beside it.
Olmsted struggles to grasp what to him is an unfamiliar scene. One speaker stands on the head of the open grave and holds a handkerchief like an open guide, “as if he have been studying from it,” proclaiming strains of scripture punctuated by howls of grief. One other man leads a call-and-response hymn, the music “wild and barbarous, however not with no plaintive melody.” Olmsted finds himself “deeply influenced … by the unaffected feeling.”
Ultimately, somebody returns from the ravine with two beech branches to mark the grave. As mourners disperse, a lone White man leans in opposition to a fence — a policeman, Olmsted presumes, required by legislation to supervise any gathering of the enslaved.
McQueen want to see that description function the idea for a memorial — possibly a bas-relief sculpture to recommend the vanished heritage of the location.
Visiting the burying floor fills her with “profound disappointment,” she says. As she walks from the deserted storage to the neatly saved Hebrew Cemetery, McQueen says she thinks of her fourth-great-grandmother on a regular basis. She’s horrified at the concept that her physique might need been stolen by resurrectionists or floor up in a roadway.
“I don’t know the place she is,” she says, however then factors over to the subsequent nook. “Besides that I believe she’s most likely over there.”
It’s a startling declare. How can she say that? “Due to the poem,” McQueen says.
Not way back, a easy Google search turned up a poem printed in 1886 by Elizabeth Akers Allen titled “Kitty Cary.” McQueen thought it have to be a coincidence due to the late date and since Allen was from faraway Maine. However then she researched.
It turned out that Allen initially printed the poem underneath a pseudonym in Harper’s Weekly in 1866. She had moved to Richmond on the finish of the Civil Warfare to assist take care of Union troops, working at an alms home transformed to a hospital. The constructing nonetheless stands, in sight of the burying floor.
“No marble tells the place Kitty Cary sleeps — / Solely a easy slab of painted pine,” the poem begins. The marker is “So close to the freeway, that the yellow sand / From passing wheels falls thickly on her grave.” Cattle and goats graze the weeds atop her grave; youngsters run throughout it “on their approach to college.”
To McQueen’s eyes, conditioned by learning outdated maps, these particulars are clues. They recommend an precise spot. It’s simply attainable that on the market alongside Hospital Road — a number of ft previous its intersection with Fourth Road, the place damaged glass glitters on a path subsequent to the “passing wheels” of the pavement — the stays of Kitty Cary nonetheless lie.
One girl, amongst so many misplaced, whose story survives.
