The Fire This Time

Walters remarks on how little she considers the reality of slavery, despite her descending from slaves. Her avoidance, in fact, comes from denial of slavery’s ugly truths and its existence throughout America, not just the South. 

Walters spends time at home in New England during winter 2006. She feels pain throughout her body she suspects comes not from illness but loneliness. She reads a book about divesting oneself of optimism and becoming a realist. Amidst current events such as the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Walters focuses on celebrity gossip. She listens to the news on the radio to focus on other matters besides herself. 

She travels to New Orleans to help her great-aunt Louise after Hurricane Katrina damaged her home. Walters’s mother drives her to the family crypt to ensure the storm did not disturb any of their graves. Walters cannot find her family’s crypt since the markers are gone. She remembers her previous visit to this cemetery ten years ago and how similar it still looks, despite how New Orleans had changed.

Her mother calls her to the car, and they gather with Aunt Lou and her friend who also suffered during the hurricane. The older women scorns Walters for trying to disturb the dead at the cemetery, but Walters argues that she is checking on their family. 

Although Walters had expected to return to New England with new motivation after her trip, she actually feels sadder, confused, and overwhelmed by what she witnesses in New Orleans. She realizes her powerful “post-New Orleans loneliness” (40) comes from a source that existed outside herself and outside time. 

She hears a radio story about the discovery of African American slaves’ remains in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The bones came from thirteen people, and as many as two hundred were presumed to also have been buried there. Somehow, Walters becomes fascinated with visiting and learning more about the people buried at this site. 

Walters arrives at the Strawbery Banke Museum in snow-covered Portsmouth. She goes to the museum ticket office and assembles with a small group of white people for a tour of the colonial homes on the museum grounds. An older man in the group from Maine was a member of the USS Indianapolis crew before it sank.

The museum guide continues the tour as a younger couple discusses colonial interior design, and Walters takes notes on Portsmouth’s Anglican history, large African population, and extensive involvement in the slave trade. Walters notices that the guide refers to a slave only as “servant” (43).

After the tour, Walters asks where to find the site of the African graves she has come to see, but the museum staff says, “You can’t see anything. There’s nothing there” (44), and that the site is merely the intersection of two streets. 

At the Court and Chestnut Streets, Walters finds a plaque that briefly describes the eighteenth-century burial site and how houses were built on top of the graves during the nineteenth century. Walter takes notes in her car and wonders if the graves still reside beneath it.

Walters reflects on her feelings after the trip, which are not outrage but acceptance. She accepts that Portsmouth devalued the Africans and African Americans at the burial site and didn’t feel connected to them, although she continues to think about them. She learns that the Strawbery Banke Museum stores some of the remains from the African Burying Ground and wondered why the staff dismissed her interest in the site. Walters attributes her lack of feeling to having no connection with the town of Portsmouth. 

In Newport, Rhode Island, Walters attends a talk by a woman named Theresa Guzmán Stokes who maintains a slave burial ground called God’s Little Acre. Guzmán Stokes’s husband, introducing her, says they will not discuss slavery but immediately critiques contemporary perceptions of slavery in New England. Newport participated in the slave trade for nearly a century and saw over 100,000 Africans sold into slavery. Although many Africans constructed local houses, only a few of these builders’ graves have markers (47).

Walters visits Newport Historical Cemetery #9 to find the graves of slaves purportedly located there. A white woman there points to two markers indicating these graves and tells Walters she was shunned for marrying a black man. She says the blue stones on a street in Newport all came from slave ships. A librarian from the Newport Historical Society contradicts the woman’s information.

At God’s Little Acre, seven markers remain to commemorate the lives of Africans in Newport. Walters speaks with a visiting woman who comments on the expense of slaves’ gravestones. 

To learn more about the daily experiences of Portsmouth slaves, Walters travels to the Black Heritage Trail in New Hampshire. Walters studies the Memorial Bridge that might have been slaves’ first sight of Portsmouth from as early as 1645. She imagines the brutality slaves underwent before seeing the unfamiliar rectangular houses of colonial Portsmouth. 

Walters asks for the archaeologists’ report on the African Burying Ground at the Portsmouth Public Library. The librarian informs her that due to the sensitivity of the matter, they would need permission from the city attorney’s office before Walters can see the report. The librarian expresses concern that Walters will denigrate Portsmouth in her writing, but Walters likes the town despite knowing its historical treatment of black people.

With the report in hand, Walters tells herself colonial white people seized Africans, sold them, denied them their full humanity in myriad ways, and developed buildings over their graves (51). She spends the summer with friends in Rhode Island and starts teaching again in fall without looking at the archaeologists’ report. She doesn’t know why she avoids it, other than the constriction in her chest while copying it in the Portsmouth library. 

The following January, she returns to Portsmouth to find an impressive new public library building. The report is now available for the public to read. Walters takes notes and makes a copy, but while reading about the exhumation of the remains, she experiences a loud noise in her throat.

Reading someone else’s experiences might inspire empathy, but empathy is difficult and discomforting. Walters considers why this might be the case. She details the archaeologists’ report of the African Burying Ground in Portsmouth. They removed the remains of thirteen people and determined that four were male and one was female. None of the remains represented a complete body, which might have resulted from the disturbance of graves by natural processes or construction (54). No causes of death were determined, though some might have experienced traumatic deaths. 

Burials 1 and 2 were both male skeletons in their twenties. Archaeologists could not identify the sex of the partial, adult skeleton at Burial 3. The excavators harmed the scant remains at Burial 4. In 1900, developers ran pipe through the coffin at Burial 5 and damaged his remains.

Excavators cut through sidewalk to uncover the head of a partial female skeleton at Burial 6, also disturbed by construction. Weather and sewage construction harmed the child skeleton at Burial 7; beneath it, Burial 12 contained an adult male. Archaeologists found the fragmentary remains of other individuals below the sidewalk at Burials 2B, 3B, 4B, 5B, and 7B. 

Portsmouth discussed how to commemorate the African Burying Ground, whose borders remain unknown, and considered a public memorial or partial street closure. The remains are still stored in a laboratory. Walters keeps her copy of the archaeologists’ report under her nightstand and wakes daily to the latest news on the radio. She places it in her backpack and forgets about it.