African Burial Ground Memorial

For all those who were lost

For all those who were stolen

For all those who were left behind

For all those who are not forgotten

If you’re ever in NYC, make sure you stop by the African Burial Ground Memorial.  It’s another one of those things that has been on my To Do list forever…so this morning I woke up and decided today was the day.  In fact, I’m making my birthday week a week of discovery; it’s too easy to live in the city and never venture beyond your sphere of comfort.  I don’t often go into Manhattan, but there’s so much history to be found there.  Visiting the memorial was an interesting and informative experience; it’s situated directly across from the building that houses (or used to house) the Immigration and Naturalization Service; I went there pretty often in the ’90s while trying to obtain my green card, and my father showed me how to use the employee entrance in order to avoid the long line of would-be citizens that snaked around the other side of the building.  Yet I don’t recall ever noticing the burial ground until it was a fenced field of grass, which didn’t hold much significance for me.  I do recall going to a ceremony, and recoiling when a black woman dressed in white robes handed us blades of grass, instructing us to use the grass to honor the ancestors; that might have been in 2003, when the remains of 419 Africans were reinterred…I think each person has to decide how s/he will pay respect to the dead; I’d love to be there at night with a small group of loved ones; large public memorial services often feel impersonal and imposed to me.  The memorial wasn’t opened until 2007, and is quite impressive.  Of course, activists and politicians had to fight to protect the site from further development once the remains were discovered by developers in the early ’90s.  There was another battle to get black anthropologists and archaeologists involved in the excavation process…sigh.  But everything is documented in a film you can view in the museum, and then I had a thorough tour of the monument itself led by National Park Ranger Cyrus.  I’m hoping to go back later this week or next for a walking tour of lower Manhattan.  I did glean one particularly useful bit of information while watching the film; in some West African cultures, reflective surfaces are worn by the dead (like a string of blue beads found around the waist of a female skeleton, below) in order to serve as windows into the afterlife.*  I’m still finalizing my “recipe” for opening a portal between the past and the present world, and that bit of information helps…

Came home and ate a late lunch while watching a Zora Neale Hurston special on PBS; found a letter in the mail from an editor asking to see more of my work…magical things can happen on the dreariest rainy day…

*I just spent an hour scouring the internet for information on beads; there’s an interesting article here, and on the Metropolitan Museum website, a description about mirrors in Central African art: “Reflective surfaces such as mirrored glass suggest the surface of water, a symbolic link to the ancestral realm. Kongo cosmology posits water as the median that separates the living world from the afterlife.”

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