In 2017 during the Centennial commemoration of the sale and transfer of the Danish West Indies to the United States, the Danish ship Danmark arrived in the town of Frederiksted in St. Croix. (courtesy of the VI Consortium)
The ship Grev Bernstoff imaged in the Danish West Indies in 1786 under Captain Schoder who sailed 115 Africans from Guinea. Copy of painting by an unknown artist. (courtesy of the Maritime Museum at Kronborg)
I am feeling a temporal and spatial collapse. Perhaps it was brought on by the pandemic, this global slow-down of time, where minutes slide into mountains and years fold into a ray of the arresting sun.
Bricks like skin house the power and living knowledge of those who were sent to die working in cane fields. There were thousands who crossed this very field limping, skin full of sores from lying in their own urine, blood and feces for months, with their hair matted, eyes squinting, wondering ... why did we survive?
The evidence of their journey is right here in this soil. You don’t have to dig deep. In just a few inches you could find the clay pipes they were given to have a soothing smoke, to help nurse them back from the brink of death, just enough to sell them at the auction block, now shrouded in black asphalt- a hidden monument.
I think about William Davis who in 1759 was rumored to have been the leader of a planned rebellion. Although he was free, he hoped to topple the system for the rest of the unfree. Yet his plans were thwarted by rumor and betrayal, and when they came for him he pleaded that they not cut him into pieces and display his vestiges. They tortured him, extracting names and confessions, incantations and disawols. And in the end, in the face of the inevitable, when left bleeding and broken, he refused them his death and claimed it for himself. They found him in the morning with his throat cut. They took his body and tied it to a horse and dragged it through the streets of Christiansted by one leg.
Then they put his body on a stake and burned it, leaving him there so that people could see what happens to those who dare to imagine themselves human in a society that casts them otherwise. There were others of course. And the brutalities exacted were similar. Each punishment was documented by the minutes they survived being broken at the wheel, or their bodies pinched by hot tongs or burned at the pyre or hung in a gibbet.
The rectangular base is a marker where the whipping post was positioned. It has been removed from view and is currently housed in storage in Fort Christiansvaern.
Death and violence form the foundation of the laws and rules, those unspoken and institutional that we live in today. This is what allowed the officers to so casually murder George Floyd despite being filmed, despite the pleading bystanders, and despite Mr. Floyd’s own pleas to them and to his deceased mother. Those officers felt the impunity of a system that would likely protect their actions. In eight minutes and forty-six seconds time slowed to a monument.
Taken from the article “Account of the Negro Rebellion on St Croix, Danish West Indies, 1759” by Waldemar Westergaard published in the Journal of Negro History, Vol.11, No 1, January 1926"
Illustration from Illustreret Tidende depicting the 1878 Labor Revolt on St. Croix, author unknown, November 1, 1878.
Black Lives Matter protests in DC, photo credit: Tyrone Turner/ DCist/ WAMU, June 4, 2020.
We are the imagined possibility of those who surmised freedom. The evidence of their journey is right here dotted across my freckled face, like a constellation. We are mineralized monuments, shaped from salted tears and crushed bones, whose shadow extends beyond the limits that history has stationed.
We are the monuments that won’t fall.
In 2017 during the Centennial commemoration of the sale and transfer of the Danish West Indies to the United States, the Danish ship Danmark arrived in the town of Frederiksted in St. Croix. (courtesy of the VI Consortium)
The ship Grev Bernstoff imaged in the Danish West Indies in 1786 under Captain Schoder who sailed 115 Africans from Guinea. Copy of painting by an unknown artist. (courtesy of the Maritime Museum at Kronborg)
I am feeling a temporal and spatial collapse. Perhaps it was brought on by the pandemic, this global slow-down of time, where minutes slide into mountains and years fold into a ray of the arresting sun.
Bricks like skin house the power and living knowledge of those who were sent to die working in cane fields. There were thousands who crossed this very field limping, skin full of sores from lying in their own urine, blood and feces for months, with their hair matted, eyes squinting, wondering ... why did we survive?
The evidence of their journey is right here in this soil. You don’t have to dig deep. In just a few inches you could find the clay pipes they were given to have a soothing smoke, to help nurse them back from the brink of death, just enough to sell them at the auction block, now shrouded in black asphalt- a hidden monument.
I think about William Davis who in 1759 was rumored to have been the leader of a planned rebellion. Although he was free, he hoped to topple the system for the rest of the unfree. Yet his plans were thwarted by rumor and betrayal, and when they came for him he pleaded that they not cut him into pieces and display his vestiges. They tortured him, extracting names and confessions, incantations and disawols. And in the end, in the face of the inevitable, when left bleeding and broken, he refused them his death and claimed it for himself. They found him in the morning with his throat cut. They took his body and tied it to a horse and dragged it through the streets of Christiansted by one leg.
Then they put his body on a stake and burned it, leaving him there so that people could see what happens to those who dare to imagine themselves human in a society that casts them otherwise. There were others of course. And the brutalities exacted were similar. Each punishment was documented by the minutes they survived being broken at the wheel, or their bodies pinched by hot tongs or burned at the pyre or hung in a gibbet.
The rectangular base is a marker where the whipping post was positioned. It has been removed from view and is currently housed in storage in Fort Christiansvaern.
Death and violence form the foundation of the laws and rules, those unspoken and institutional that we live in today. This is what allowed the officers to so casually murder George Floyd despite being filmed, despite the pleading bystanders, and despite Mr. Floyd’s own pleas to them and to his deceased mother. Those officers felt the impunity of a system that would likely protect their actions. In eight minutes and forty-six seconds time slowed to a monument.
Taken from the article “Account of the Negro Rebellion on St Croix, Danish West Indies, 1759” by Waldemar Westergaard published in the Journal of Negro History, Vol.11, No 1, January 1926"
Illustration from Illustreret Tidende depicting the 1878 Labor Revolt on St. Croix, author unknown, November 1, 1878.
Black Lives Matter protests in DC, photo credit: Tyrone Turner/ DCist/ WAMU, June 4, 2020.
We are the imagined possibility of those who surmised freedom. The evidence of their journey is right here dotted across my freckled face, like a constellation. We are mineralized monuments, shaped from salted tears and crushed bones, whose shadow extends beyond the limits that history has stationed.
We are the monuments that won’t fall.