The African Burial Ground: More Questions Than Answers

 

What does it mean to bury the dead? Is it meant to be only a fitting end to a cherished life; a means of honoring someone now gone? Or is it more? Is burial the end, as well as the beginnings of something culturally and ethnically new? If so, can anything, or anyone truly be buried?

These were a few of the questions that came to mind while beginning my tour of the African burial ground. Saddening quotes and graphic images lined the walls. I walked beneath their weight. Small knickknacks and aged silverware sat in cases around me. It was morbid, cold and still. It was a burial ground.  

Until, that is, I made my way to the center of the exhibit. Surrounded by the scattered remnants of hundreds of lost souls stood the life-like creation of an African family burying a child-sized casket. It was the best example of death and sorrow inside the exhibit. Yet it was also the most alive. Pain, suffering, anger and hope rang through small speakers in the walls. The look on the face of each family member mirrored those all too familiar from my own life.   

What surprised me most where the ceremonies and practices described and pictured around me. I listened to African hymns of hope tinged with elements of Christian spirituality. Mention of God and other deities rang throughout the recreation of the scene. It was reminiscent of Jarena Lee: electric passion, skillful oration, adherence to the divine, hope. Where these the beginnings of African-American Christianity in the United States? How would those like W.E.B Dubois respond to such a scene? Is this an enslaved family using the religion of their oppressor due to some perceived inferiority? Or was there something about Christianity that lent itself easily to the burial of such innocence?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know the importance of what I saw. The portrayal of such loss sits at the intersection of America’s all too long and sad history with slavery: the repression of a people and the subjugation of its future. But it also sits at the intersection of something new. I couldn’t help but feel that I was watching the beginnings of a tradition take root. A tradition Jarena Lee would come to adopt, James Baldwin would question, and W.E.B Dubois would outright reject. Here, I thought, are the roots of African-American Christianity.

But are any of these people actually American? In this time, place and context what does it even mean to be American when there is no America? Would these individuals want to be considered American? Many of those now buried here were born thousands of miles to the east in western Africa. And yet they helped build and construct this country. The burial ground sits across the street from a US citizenship and immigration office and yet it seems difficult to place the status of these people within our categories.

I, for all it is worth, think these people are most certainly American. Perhaps not in technicality nor in life, but certainly in death and certainly in legacy. How telling is it of our collective history to know our greatest most important financial centers rest on top the graves of thousands of slaves. That is not a history to bury.