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 may 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 most important cemetery without cost 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 courting 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 harm the burying floor. McQueen and different advocates are scrambling to push the Federal Railroad Administration to sluggish the method and reroute the tracks.
“So many issues have been carried out to this, nevertheless it’s nonetheless a burial floor,” McQueen mentioned on a current go to to Richmond. She walked alongside Hospital Road, lower 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 keep in mind seeing this for the primary time and considering I should be within the incorrect place,” she mentioned. “However I wasn’t.”
McQueen’s work suggests the breadth of historical past underfoot in a spot similar to Richmond, an outdated metropolis that had lengthy saved a jealous focus on Accomplice statues and monuments.
Nevertheless it additionally reveals the ability of the best of non-public 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, bought considering family tree by way of a cousin in Charlottesville. It was imagined to be a quiet interest. She is an especially non-public particular person — don’t attempt asking her age — however had lengthy been curious when family members advised 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 shaped 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 instructional, however she actually brings an instructional’s rigor to the analysis that she does,” mentioned French, who now teaches on the College of Central Florida however this yr resumed a particular course at Morven with McQueen. “She’s moved in a extremely highly effective approach by the necessity to do this type of work.”
His college students situated a listing of property from the need of early Morven proprietor David Higginbotham, who died in 1853; it named 56 enslaved individuals. French thought the record 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.
“Perhaps that’s the explanation 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 kids and belonged to a church. The Higginbotham daughters referred to her affectionately in letters — she might need been concerned in elevating them, presumably 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 loss of life, the household bought the farm and auctioned off the enslaved staff. His spouse moved away. As of 2010, that was all McQueen may be taught.
“I used to be left with a cliffhanger,” McQueen mentioned, “besides that the proprietor’s widow indicated to her daughter that she would hold 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 loss of life.
“It was a really lovely letter. It made me cry,” mentioned McQueen, who speaks quietly and betrays little emotion in public.
“Our pricey, trustworthy, outdated Kitty is [no] extra,” Elizabeth Fisher wrote, in line with 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 kids gathered bedside as she mentioned her remaining phrases, “Don’t cry kids, 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 carried out 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 seek out. It additionally offered a clue: Cary’s remaining resting place was close to the household’s downtown dwelling.
McQueen’s elation took an unpleasant flip the subsequent day. One of many subjects at her U-Va. symposium was the observe of grave-robbing that plagued Richmond through the 1800s. So-called resurrectionists dug up corpses for dissection within the medical faculties 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 Fifties, that web site is now lined with grass and put aside as a spot for reflection. For almost 20 years, the Sacred Floor Historic Reclamation Mission — 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 timber. McQueen marveled on the setting — the James River far beneath, {couples} and schoolchildren strolling previous elaborate grave markers telling of so many lives.
The following day she went to seek 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 analyze. 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 advised a minimum of 22,000 burials. New York’s African burial floor is assumed to comprise stays of about 15,000 individuals.
Starting within the Reconstruction period, the Richmond burying floor was systematically erased — first from view, then from reminiscence. Street staff dug up graves within the Eighteen Eighties and, regardless of warnings from the town council, used the bones as fill materials, in line with up to date information accounts discovered by McQueen and archaeologist Steve Thompson.
A number 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 advised no historic sources can be broken by the mission.
Working from Texas and overcoming a concern of the limelight, McQueen has marshaled a military of supporters to battle again. She helped the D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation make a video in regards to the web site.
In 2018, McQueen found that the now-abandoned gasoline station was on an inventory of tax delinquent properties to be bought 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’ve listed, we’ve by no means had a single nomination [for a historical marker] obtain so many letters of assist,” 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 distinct kind of historical past.
Its profitable itemizing will “definitely open up the potential of 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 sluggish the method for approving building of a brand new high-speed prepare route between Richmond and D.C., which is ready to chop yet another scar throughout the bones of individuals’s ancestors.
The Federal Railroad Administration “absolutely acknowledges the cultural and historic significance of the Shockoe Hill African Burying Grounds,” a spokesman for the company mentioned by way of electronic mail, including that regulators will work with stakeholders in a assessment course of that might take years.
Regardless of all the destruction, components of the cemetery stay. A current 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 look at slavery.
Olmsted writes of visiting Richmond in 1853 and coming upon a “negro funeral.” His description suits the Shockoe Hill African Burying Floor — a “desolate place” simply past the town’s principal cemetery, which in contrast is “nicely stuffed 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 recent grave of a kid; one other grave is open beside it.
Olmsted struggles to know 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 had 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 out a plaintive melody.” Olmsted finds himself “deeply influenced … by the unaffected feeling.”
In the long run, somebody returns from the ravine with two beech branches to mark the grave. As mourners disperse, a lone White man leans towards a fence — a policeman, Olmsted presumes, required by regulation to supervise any gathering of the enslaved.
McQueen want to see that description function the premise for a memorial — possibly a bas-relief sculpture to recommend the vanished heritage of the location.
Visiting the burying floor fills her with “profound unhappiness,” 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 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 in all probability 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 revealed in 1886 by Elizabeth Akers Allen titled “Kitty Cary.” McQueen thought it should 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 revealed 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 look after 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; kids run throughout it “on their strategy 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 toes 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.
