Multiply/Divide. Wendy S. Walters
swells and recedes—but I won’t. The reason is not clear to me even now. What I do know is that holding the copy I had made of the report near the Xerox machine by the dimly lit front door of the Portsmouth Public Library that previous spring made me feel more than I had felt during any of my gravesite visits, like a balloon in my chest was expanding and taking up all the space I normally used to breathe.
Intense discomfort, I had thought. Maybe that’s enough.
But by January I was driving back up to Portsmouth, irritated with myself for not reading the copy of the report I had already made but even more irritated with myself for not being able to let it go unread. The once tattered and gloomy public library had moved to a brilliant new building a few streets over, and as I walked around the landscapers installing the brick steps, I caught the sign on the door that said, Welcome to Your New Library. In the breezeway, three junior high school girls gathered around a computer terminal and giggled. A woman in a purple cardigan greeted me from behind the circulation desk with a smile and thin wave. Seduced by all of it, I thought, I love my new library.
When I asked the reference librarian about the report, he told me it was now shelved in the local history section in the regular stacks. I thought, Now it’s all out in the open. Now there’s nothing to hide. I grabbed it off the wall, took a seat at one of the new blond reading tables and thumbed through it lightly as if it were a mere tabloid magazine. I took notes from the acknowledgments, introduction, and background chapters, but when I got to the section describing the removal of the coffins—those same pages I had copied nearly a year before—a shrill noise came up from the back of my throat at the pitch of a full tea kettle in a rolling-boil whistle. I cleared my throat and went back to reading, but my din started again. It was sharp enough for anyone to hear, so I decided I had better leave—but not before making a fresh copy of the report to take with me.
When a story is unpleasant, it is hard to focus on details that allow you to put yourself in the place of the subject because the pain of distortion starts to feel familiar. Paying attention often requires some sort of empathy for the subject, or at the very least, for the speaker. But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves. Or because empathy requires us to dig way down into the murk, deeper than our own feelings go, to a place where the boundaries between our experience and everyone else’s no longer exist.
Archaeologists removed the remains of thirteen people from beneath the intersection of Chestnut and Court Streets with the help of some machinery, but they did most of the digging by hand. Once in the laboratory, they used potter’s tools and paintbrushes to remove excess soil from the bones and teeth. The exact dates associated with each burial remain unknown, but it is assumed that all were interred during the eighteenth century. Four males and one female could be identified by sex, but they found it impossible to determine the sex of the other eight, though most were believed to be in early adulthood, between the ages of twenty-one and forty years. Heads of the deceased generally faced west, suggesting a burial in the Christian tradition. In no cases were all the bones of an individual represented, perhaps due to the commingling of remains during previous installations of gas and sewer lines, the stacking of coffins, or a high water table in the soil. Thus no cause of death could be determined for any of those recovered. Archaeologists noted, however, that the lack of visible traumatic defects, cut marks, fresh or healed fractures does not rule out the presence of trauma. The teeth of each person, which in several cases constituted the entirety of the remains, appeared to be better preserved than their bones, which were found wet, free of flesh, colored gray or black and, in the case of long bones, often missing the ends.
Pieces of the skull, portions of the upper and lower limbs, shoulder girdle, ribs, spine, and pelvis of a male person between the ages of twenty-one and thirty years represent Burial 1. An excavator operator noticed his leg bones sticking out from the bottom of his coffin, which was made of white pine and was hexagonal in shape. All of his mandibular and some of his maxillary teeth were present, but like most of those recovered at the site, his teeth exhibit traces of enamel hypoplasia, a sign of previous infection or nutritional stress. His bones revealed a calcified blood vessel in his right lower leg and prolonged shin splints. A pumpkin seed of unexplained significance was found in his coffin as well as a metal object, probably a shroud pin, suggesting he was naked at burial.
In Burial 2, the remains of another male person between twenty-one and twenty-six years of age were found in good condition despite the fact that part of his skull had been unintentionally crushed by the excavator, leaving only his mandible and several teeth. A gas line running through the foot portion of his coffin meant that many bones in his right foot also were missing. His body was slumped to the left side, probably due to his coffin being tipped during burial, and his hipbone was broken in several places. His right hand lay over his thigh. Further analysis of his bones showed signs of repetitive forearm rotation and possible inflammation of the right leg, presumably from heavy shoveling, lifting, or other strenuous work. Salt, either used as a preservative before burial or for some other ritual, and a single tooth of unknown origin found between his knees, further distinguished his remains.
Burial 3 contained the remains of a person of indeterminate sex, thought to be approximately thirty to fifty years of age with the head facing east, perhaps toward Mecca. Archaeologists recovered only extremely fragile fragments of the cranium and major long bones. The part of the mandible that was still intact suggests participation in a West African puberty ritual as there is a long-healed-over gap where lower and lateral incisors would have been. Stains in the soil represented most of the coffin wood. Only thirty teeth, small fragments of bone, some wood and coffin nails accounted for the person of twenty-one to forty years of age in Burial 4. Those remains were extremely damaged by erosion and the unintentional intrusion of the excavator.
Pipe laid around 1900 across the bottom of the coffin of the male person aged twenty-one to forty in Burial 5 eventually disintegrated his lower extremities. Shovel marks on the coffin base indicate where a crew member either hit his coffin accidentally or attempted to cut through it.
The head of the female person in Burial 6 was located under the sidewalk, which had to be caved in to allow for her removal. Only the upper portion of her coffin was found intact. Her lower legs, cut off where they intersected with a utility trench and a ceramic sewage pipe installed around 1900, revealed evidence of a bone infection and severe inflammation of the shins. Her left arm appeared to be laid across her torso, and her cranium, now missing the face, pointed to the right side of the coffin. Her upper central incisors were shaved, possibly according to a West African cultural tradition, and represent the earliest documented case of such dental modification in North America.
The person in Burial 7 was a child between the ages of seven and twelve, of unknown sex, whose remains were damaged by heavy rain and a redirected sewer line that flooded the graveshaft during excavation. Decades of a sewer pipe lying across the child’s midsection also contributed to this poor state, despite the fact that the coffin was found to be in relatively good condition. Directly beneath that body were the remains of a male person between twenty-one and forty years of age in Burial 12 whose bones were very soft due also to the high water table of the soil. At present, it is impossible to tell if these two people were buried at the same time or possibly even generations apart. The coffinless remains of persons in Burials 2B, 3B, 4B, 5B, and 7B were discovered beneath the sidewalk. Dental fragments and hand bones from a person not presently attributed to Burial 2 but found nearby are all that exists of the person in Burial 2B. Twelve teeth represent the person in Burial 3B. One tooth each indicates persons in Burials 4B and 5B, and a femur shaft fragment resting atop the child’s coffin in Burial 7 is all that was found of the person in Burial 7B.
The boundaries of Portsmouth’s African Burying Ground are still a mystery, as they have been for more than one hundred years, but plans to build a formal memorial are underway. Public discussions led by the state’s archaeologists have asked city residents to consider whether a part of either street should be closed to vehicular traffic. Some Portsmouth residents have submitted samples of their DNA to see if they are in any way related to those people whose remains, now stored in Ethafoam, 0.002 mil polybags, and acid-free archival storage boxes in a municipally provided laboratory space, await reinterment.
Because