NEWPORT — There are still stories hidden beneath the earth of God’s Little Acre — stories of mystery, tragedy and pride.God’s Little Acre is the name given to the portion of Newport’s Common Burying Ground...
NEWPORT — There are still stories hidden beneath the earth of God’s Little Acre — stories of mystery, tragedy and pride.
God’s Little Acre is the name given to the portion of Newport’s Common Burying Ground used to bury enslaved and free Africans since Colonial times. It’s one of the oldest African graveyards in America.
Keith Stokes and his wife, Theresa Guzman Stokes, have been studying the cemetery, and through it the history of black life in Colonial Newport, for decades. Going through their database of about 250 grave markers at God’s Little Acre, the couple often exude a sense that the people beneath the weathered slate markers are old friends.
There’s sadness in the triple headstone for three small children — Amber, Betsy and Phoebe Taylor — all dead within 15 months in 1800-1801.
Mystery? Consider the riddle of 2-year-old Ann Oliver, who has two identical gravestones — one in Newport, one in Dorchester, Mass. — listing the same parents, same master and the same date, 1743.
As for pride, read the inscription on the 1804 stone of Duchess Quamino, whose baking skills led her to be known as the Pastry Queen of Rhode Island:
“In memory of Duchess Quamino, A Free Black of distinguished excellence: Intellectual, Industrious, Affectionate, Honest and of
Exemplary Piety Who deceased June 29, 1804, aged 65 years.”
Keith Stokes has been visiting God’s Little Acre all his life. He has family buried there, including his father, Archie. Standing in the soft snow during a sunny winter afternoon, Stokes gestured at a spot next to his father’s tombstone.
“This is probably where I’ll be,” he said.
Probably the biggest
mystery of God’s Little Acre is just how many people are buried there. The area now has about 300 headstones, but many others have been lost to vandals, weather and time.
Theresa Guzman Stokes gestured at some empty spaces between the headstones, and remarked that her mother-in-law remembered a time when almost all the land in God’s Little Acre was occupied by grave markers.
Keith and Theresa have recently revamped their website, colonialcemetery.com. It now includes not only an expanded database of all the headstones they’ve been able to decipher, but much more: A list of free blacks in Newport from the 1774 census; current pictures of houses once owned by free blacks; a 1766 picnic menu from the diary of Caesar Lyndon, a slave to Rhode Island governor Josiah Lyndon; and a list of students at the African Free School.
Keith, a long-time student of Newport history, is former executive director of the Newport County Chamber of Commerce and former executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. He now works for the Mayforth Group, a government relations firm.
Theresa is a former associate editor for Newport Life Magazine, a website designer and president of the 1696 Heritage Group, a heritage and historic consulting group. (The first documented slave ship to come to Newport, the Sea Flower, arrived in 1696.)
Keith said Colonial-era blacks in Newport, most of whom came from west Africa, retained much of their African identity. They used African names, such as Cuffe, an Anglicization of Kofi, a name used in Ghana to designate boys born on a Friday.
“They didn’t come here as a blank slate,” he said. “They came with their own culture and histories.”
In 1780 — four years before Rhode Island began gradually emancipating its slaves — Newport’s blacks formed the Free African Union Society, the first such organization in the country. Stokes pointed out that the organization specifically identified as African.
Some of the angels carved on the tombstones in God’s Little Acre have curly hair and distinctly African features. They may have been carved by Zingo Stevens, a slave who worked in the stone shop of John Stevens Jr. He has three wives buried in God’s Little Acre.
Keith pointed out that life for Colonial-era blacks in Newport was very different from the slave system in the cotton fields of the American South or the brutal sugar plantations of the Caribbean.
Colonial Newport was a thriving seaport, and needed skilled workers and craftsmen. Masters often brought slaves to Newport as children, since it could take between 5 and 10 years to learn a trade.
There were no slave quarters in Newport. Slaves generally lived side by side with their masters, often in crowded conditions.
Besides an urban, maritime economy, a second key factor for blacks living in Colonial Newport was religion, in particular the Great Awakening, an evangelical Christian movement that swept the country in the 18th century.
Under the influence of the Great Awakening, blacks both free and enslaved were encouraged to become Christians, and offered religious education. Often they worshipped alongside their masters.
Keith said that between a shared religious experience, close living quarters and economic “interdependence,” blacks and whites had more interaction in Colonial Newport than they do now.
According to the
1774 census, Newport had a population of about 9,200. Roughly 13.5 percent, about 1,246, were of African descent. After the American Revolution, the British destroyed Newport as a port, and the city went into an economic slump. Many of Newport’s blacks left for Boston, New York and Providence.
“I want to tell the story of the African people, not of the slave system,” Keith said. “These are not slaves, not chattel property, not historical ghosts. They’re human beings. … They’re people who talked back to their parents, drank too much, got fired from jobs. Ordinary people.”
A problem with Black History Month, said Keith, is that it focuses heavily on a very small group of extraordinary people: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth.
“We tend to give people black superheroes,” Keith said. “Very few people could aspire to what these people accomplished.”
Keith and Theresa have four children. When they were still in school, Theresa would ask what they learned about during Black History Month, and they would say, “The same thing as last year.”
The couple would like to change that, and paint a broader picture of black history.
“One of the most important things about this,” said Theresa, “is when we do a tour or a lecture, looking at kids and watch their eyes light up.”
BURIED IN GOD’S LITTLE ACRE
Newport Gardner, also known as Occramar Marycoo, was a prominent member of Newport’s African community, and an early member of the Free African Union Society.
The name “Occramar Marycoo” puzzled the Stokeses, since it doesn’t appear to be an African name. Their best guess is that it’s a corruption of Nkrumah Mireku. Nkrumah designates the ninth child in a family and Mireku is a common surname in Ghana.
Gardner was a music teacher who taught at the Free African School and was a leader in the early back-to-Africa movement. He returned to Africa in 1826, sailing on the brig Vine out of Boston with 23 others from Newport and landing in Liberia.
Unfortunately, the Newport party succumbed to disease within a year of arriving in Africa.
Gardner’s wife, Limas, and three children are buried in God’s Little Acre.
Two white clergymen in Newport, Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins, raised money from throughout New England to send two black missionaries back to Africa for the purpose of bringing the Christian faith to their former countrymen.
In 1774, John Quamino and Bristol Yamma of Newport were sent to the College of New Jersey — now Princeton University — under the educational guidance of John Witherspoon, the college president. Through missionaries already stationed overseas, contact was made with members of Quamino’s family still in Africa.
But before Newport’s missionaries could make their journey, the American Revolution put a halt to their plans.
Quamino died at sea, aboard an American privateer, shortly after the Revolutionary War started. His wife, Duchess, would find success in her own right as a baker, earning enough money to buy freedom for herself and her children. She is buried in God’s Little Acre.
Women were allowed to be members of Newport’s Free African Union Society, formed in 1780, but they did not have voting rights.
So, in 1809, Obour Tanner and several other African women formed the African Female Benevolent Society, which led to efforts to support African widows and their children, and to establish a free school for African children.
Tanner, who probably came from Senegal, was a slave in the household of a Newport silversmith, John Tanner. She learned to read and write and was baptized in the First Congregational Church in 1768.
She was about 80 when she died on June 21, 1835, after an active religious and civic life.