Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (20 page)

Olga was carrying heavy bags, so we walked slowly past the wig and pawn shops and the Rastafarians selling incense on rickety card tables. Without any regard to aesthetics, storefronts selling everything from french fries to sneakers were jammed next to each other. As we walked, a young woman raced by us talking on her cell phone. She was beautiful and she knew it. Her tight pants showed off her perfect figure and I marveled at her ability to walk in such pointy-toed, highheeled shoes. Everyone within twenty feet of her could hear her conversation. “Yo, meet me on Fulton by the Duane Reade! … Fulton Street!” It is hard to imagine that this Fulton Street was once a dirt road on which Harriet Tubman led escaped slaves to safe houses. The crowd around us was dense. Olga stopped to make sure I took it all in. Once again, she peeked at me over her shades. Downtown Brooklyn was undergoing major reconstruction. It was only a matter of time before even this stretch of consumer distraction became gentrified. I was going to ask what she thought about that, but we had arrived at the corner of Fulton and Flatbush.

In 2005, the city conamed this section of Fulton Street Harriet Ross Tubman Avenue in honor of the African American abolitionist who ferried slaves from the South to freedom in the North. Olga followed my gaze up at the signage. I was sure she was going to comment on the fact that Ms. Tubman had to share billing. I wondered about that myself since Robert Fulton, the steamboat inventor, also had streets named for him in Manhattan and elsewhere. She set her bags on the sidewalk without taking her eyes off the signs. Her red-and-white striped hat covered all of her hair except for fuzzy gray and black curls poking out at the sides.

“Look at the sign,” Olga said. “What do you see?” Fulton’s green metal sign hung above the one for Harriet Ross Tubman. Her lips curled into a half smile. I was missing her point. “But what else do you see? Look closer.” Fulton Street had been written in all caps and Harriet Ross Tubman’s wasn’t. If her full name had been in all caps, I thought, the sign would probably be too long and snap off in a stiff wind. But I said nothing. I played dumb.

“His name is capitalized!” she said, her finger pointing to the sign like a first grade teacher. “Except for the first letters, her name is in lower case! And you see, she is at the bottom. He is at the top. They call us minority. What does minority mean? It means less than, not as good as. That’s what they want us to believe. Minority. It’s in the dictionary. Look it up.”

On the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Fulton/Tubman, I listened to Olga’s tutorials on racism and capitalism. She told me about her family, how she is the only one to live and work in the states. How her children are back on the island of St. Vincent protecting the family land. I asked her where she worked, but she was vague, still unsure if she could trust me. I looked down at her bags and saw that they were filled with books. Occasionally, someone passed by and called out a greeting to her and she would respond, but she never lost her train of thought, moving from African land grabs to the biogenetic seeds that corporations are sending to the Caribbean and South America.

“They send us seeds that grow the vegetables for one season and then we have to buy the seeds again for the next year! Non-fertile seeds! These men are smart but evil. They are enemies of nature.”

All was going well until she moved on to religion, starting with Abraham and the Egyptian slaves and what was left out of the Old and New Testaments. It had nothing to do with Olga. It was me. When anyone starts talking religion, my eyes begin to glaze over and I want to run away screaming. It’s the fault of my Baptist upbringing in Louisiana that promised rewards only after you were dead. I politely interrupted Olga, thanked her for her insight, and told her that I had to get to the library before it closed, which was true. She gave me one of those half smiles again, this one with all sorts of meaning behind it. The one I went away with was,
Can you handle what
I’ve just told you?

At the Brooklyn Public Library, I was given a file labeled
Plymouth Church
. Inside of it I discovered a newspaper drawing of Henry Ward Beecher, the famous abolitionist minister standing before his congregation with a young girl at his side. The description under it read,
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher
auctioning “Pinky” slave girl
. I had heard of Beecher, mostly because of his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote
Uncle
Tom’s Cabin
, but who was Pinky? What happened to her? In the drawing her long hair fell below her waist. Her features were Caucasian, except for a small rounded nose that hinted at Africa. Elizabeth Keckly would have to wait, I thought. I left the library and headed back to Brooklyn Heights.

Like most Americans, when I think of slavery I think of the South, which is why I was shocked to discover that in 1790, according to the first U.S. Census, Brooklyn was the second largest slave-holding city after Charleston, South Carolina, the center of the slave trade. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln came to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn to hear Henry Ward Beecher preach against the evils of slavery, which had been abolished for more than three decades in the state.

Lois Rosebrooks led myself, a young man, and his uncle to pew 89 where Abraham Lincoln sat in 1860, the day before he gave his antislavery speech at Cooper Union; the speech that would help win him the Republican nomination and set the stage for the Civil War. The young man sat in the pew while his uncle snapped a picture of his beaming face. Lois gave a brief talk about the day Lincoln visited Plymouth and then they left. The young man was on his way to college and had to catch a plane. Once they were gone, Lois and I settled in. This time, I took the seat were Lincoln had sat and imagined his long legs, his knees knocking against the pew in front of me.

Lois didn’t look anything like what her card said she was: Director of History Ministry Services. She was wearing a short-sleeved blue housedress with colorful flowers embroidered around the neck. Her reddish-brown hair was styled nicely, just below her ears. It was as if she were in her own home and any minute would offer me cookies and a cup of tea. I glanced down at her feet, half expecting slippers, but saw instead sensible black shoes. Her eyes sparkled when I told her I wanted to know about the mock slave auctions. It was obvious that she loved her job.

“Plymouth Church was called, by some, the
Grand Central
Depot
” she began, with a strong, pleasant-sounding voice. “Beecher encouraged his congregation to purchase the freedom of actual slaves in order to draw attention to it. We’ve found evidence of at least eleven mock slave auctions in our files. We can tell by the financial records of the church. Pinky was the most famous. She was nine years old, and auctioned here just before the war. The church returned her to her grandmother.”

I looked around the large room. It reminded me of an Elizabethan theater with its crescent-shaped seating and no center aisle. Stained-glass windows flanked the secondfloor balcony depicting famous leaders of the time, including Beecher, his sister, and Abraham Lincoln. A pleasant change I thought from the bloody crucifixion scenes found in most churches. When I asked how she came to be the historian for Plymouth, which was renamed Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims after a merger in 1934, she said, “I realized one day that something had to be done about the history of our church.” Her voice resonated off the high ceiling. “There was too much of it here.”

Lois had a presence and ease about her delivery that made me ask if she was a performer. “I used to sing professionally.” She tilted her head modestly to one side. The light caught a small flame of gray hair above her forehead. “I was a soprano. I would sing all over the city. I sang at Mother Zion up in Harlem for fourteen years. I started in 1967, or was it ’66? I’d have to check to be sure.

“At the time, Adam Clayton Powell, who preached at Abyssinian Baptist Church, didn’t like the idea of me singing in Harlem. In one of his sermons, he complained about me:
Those black churches that hire white sopranos …”
The memory amused her and me. “But soon after, Mother Zion’s choir went to sing at Abyssinian. Reverend Powell walked up to me and shook my hand and he said, ‘Welcome to Harlem.’”

All this time I had been talking to Lois about history and not realizing that she was a part of it herself.

I asked her if I could stand on the platform where Pinky stood. To my surprise, she said yes. I climbed the few steps up to the small stage, which was about four feet wide and eight feet long and covered in red carpet. Lois stood off to the side and told me about the baptismal recently discovered under the pulpit there, but the pounding in my chest rose to my ears and drummed out her words. The church was empty except for Lois and me; I crossed my arms protectively in front of myself. I couldn’t help but cast my eyes down, like Pinky’s were in the drawing. I felt exposed, vulnerable, and frightened. Mock or real, it must have been awful having your life in the hands of complete strangers, even well-meaning ones. I wanted to get down off the stage.

Lois completed the tour by showing me the basement under the church. A flight of stairs took us down to it. I ran my hand along the brick walls, piecing together yet another part of the puzzle. There were no records of who was hidden here, of course. Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the federal government could be called in to aid in the arrest and return of slaves to their masters. Runaways and those who assisted them were careful not to leave tracks—yet still I wanted to discover some mark, anything left behind; though I was sure that if such evidence existed, Lois would have found it long ago, as would the rats. “I have to stomp my feet on occasion before coming down here. That usually scares them off,” she said.

The basement was neat and clean considering we were under the church. There were three openings that led underneath separate parts of the building. The entrance to one of them was covered with an iron fire door that led beneath an addition that was built after a fire in the 1920s. Another was blocked by fallen debris and construction material, making it impossible to go inside; but the third opening was unobstructed. Lois switched on a light and I could see the brick pillars that held up the foundation. The dirt floor was strewn with rocks but there was plenty of room to hide.

“One day, the workmen for Con Edison discovered a tunnel under the street next to the church, but they filled it in before we were called.” Lois’s stricken face mirrored my own. “It was unfortunate. It could have given us valuable information.”

Knowing history, and having a physical place to connect it to, is a magical combination. It binds you to that place in time in a way books and films on their own can never do. To be where a momentous event happened, to sit were Lincoln sat, to walk were Harriet Tubman walked, brings the past present, so that for a moment their pain and sacrifice, victories and losses, are yours. Their mistakes are ours not to repeat, and their triumphs to advance upon. It’s why the Holocaust Memorial Museum keeps the shoes from the concentration camps, why we mark where George Washington slept, and why I asked to stand where a slave girl named Pinky once stood. Keeping these artifacts and preserving these places honors our past and is essential to our future.

After I left Plymouth Church, I walked through Brooklyn Heights on streets named after some of the earliest Dutch and English settlers—Hicks, Remsen, Boerum—landowners who made their fortunes in no small part from the efforts of slave labor. The homes are beautiful, pristine, like the homes on Duffield Street once were. Brooklyn Heights is a historic district, with well-documented evidence of its past. It is where, during the revolutionary war, George Washington and his men fought the British and where homes stood through which Harriet Tubman scuttled fugitive slaves to safety during the Civil War. Washington and Tubman couldn’t be more different, and yet their defiant spirit, their determination to do what needed to be done against a formidable enemy, is a large part of what Brooklyn is made of.

“May I have your attention, please?” said a young man who looked like he had just begun shaving that morning. I was on the train headed for Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I don’t mean to disturb you, but I’m selling candy this morning.” I buried my face in my newspaper. Others busied themselves with electronic devices or fiddled inside their purses. “And I’m not selling them for a basketball team or for a school. I’m selling them for myself.
Me
,” he said tenaciously. I looked up from my paper. I hadn’t heard this one before. “And I plan on spending my money wisely and in a responsible manner. Thank you.”

As our train pulled into the Utica Avenue station, an older gentleman, a black Muslim dressed in a long white tunic, called the kid over. “I don’t want the candy,” he said. “Take the dollar.” He shoved the money into the kid’s hand with as much cockiness as the kid had shown delivering his speech. Such a display of industriousness and pluck was a perfect introduction to my next destination.

African American historical landmarks are disappearing at an alarming rate. Too often what is left can only be imagined, but sometimes we get lucky. Weeksville was one of the earliest free African American communities, the center of intellectual, cultural, and economic life in Brooklyn. At its peak during the 1860s and ’70s, five hundred to seven hundred prosperous African American families lived there. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the first female African American doctor in New York State, and Moses P. Cobb, Brooklyn’s first black policeman, were among them. Some of the homes and churches were key stops on the Underground Railroad, undocumented of course; and there were at least two forgotten newspapers, the
Freedman’s Torchlight
and the
People’s Journal
. But despite that history, the four remaining structures of Weeksville had been scheduled to be torn down in 1968 in order to build more housing projects. Thankfully, they were saved by the efforts of James Hurley and Joseph Haynes, an historian and an amateur pilot, armed with an old map and a plane. They flew over the area and spotted an unfamiliar lane and several dilapidated homes partially hidden by overgrown weeds.