Susanna Graham-Pye’s book, “For the Unremembered,” searches to uncover the history of slavery on Cape Cod. The book’s challenge: The history is so well-hidden.
Susanna has pieced together fragments from almost every Cape town, proof slaves worked this land before and after this nation’s creation.
But humanizing details, intimate accounts, mostly evaded her.
“There is a lot of ‘could have been’ or ‘should have been’ based on what I was able to document,” she acknowledges. “I didn’t want to come off in any way other than wondering. I also felt the silence that’s been going on for so long almost says more than anything. So speaking names is one small thing we can do.”
This is a travelogue. Susanna includes “places for reflection,” buildings, boardwalks, beaches, museums, woodlands. These destinations plot a different journey through this much-traveled place.
Every chapter invokes a name. Among them Sabina, “given” to Mercy and Shubael Taylor (in what is now Yarmouth) in the late 1700s by Mercy’s father, Reverend Joseph Lord, who had ministered in South Carolina then came back to Chatham.
She might have been the Reverend’s wedding present.
Susanna traces Sabina’s life through three owners, the last being the Bournes in Barnstable. When widow Bourne died in 1782, she willed slaves to her next generation but not Sabina who, as Susanna concludes, “could have passed away years before her enslavers did.”
There is more to know about “Hector,” a slave in Truro, thanks to the wonderful historian Shebnah Rich.
Jonathan Paine owned slaves in the early 1700s. So did Richard Paine, including “Joe,” who let his master know he much wanted a wife. A woman in Boston was procured and brought to Truro. A boy was born, Hector.
When Hector was about three years old, in 1726, Jonathan sold him to Benjamin Collins for 30 pounds (the price of a fertile acre of land). He lived a long solitary life along the Pamet River, as an old man described “with bleached locks and dim eyes, struggling amid the last waves of a toilsome life.”
For years thereafter places in Truro were described as “Hector’s Bridge,” “Hector’s Nook,” “Hector’s Stubble,” and a moonless night “black as Hector.” Even so, no gravestone for him was erected.
There is a strong link between the need for more truthful narratives about slavery and about Native American relationships.
For starters, Wampanoags were traded into slavery and shipped to Bermuda and the Caribbean. Governor John Winthrop, who formalized enslavement in 1641, received a letter from his brother-in-law that summed up the plan: “If upon a just war the Lord should deliver (Native people) into our hands, we might easily have men, women and children enough to exchange for Moores (Black Africans) which will be more gainful pillage for us than we conceive, for I do not see how we can thrive until we get into a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business.”
Were we taught this economic strategy and justification, conceived in New England -- not the Deep South? No, and Susanna says her book was inspired because her mother, a middle school teacher (as is Susanna), “would come home and rail about the curriculum in the eighth grade.”
The school narrative has gotten better, but still, Susanna Graham-Pye believes her book’s title, “The Unremembered,” is more than justified.
