Date: 2025-01-04 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00027576
US SLAVERY
SLAVERY IN NEW YORK STATE
Digging into her family’s roots, a writer finds a disturbing secret
Debra Bruno’s “A Hudson Valley Reckoning” highlights the erasure of enslavement history in the North.
SLAVERY IN NEW YORK STATE
Digging into her family’s roots, a writer finds a disturbing secret
Debra Bruno’s “A Hudson Valley Reckoning” highlights the erasure of enslavement history in the North.
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Debra Bruno’s “A Hudson Valley Reckoning” highlights the erasure of enslavement history in the North.
Review by Libby Copeland
October 19, 2024 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
Several years ago, Debra Bruno, a D.C.-based journalist, began researching her family’s past. She quickly realized that she knew less about her ancestry than she thought she did — and that her historical records revealed a disturbing secret.
Bruno’s new book, “A Hudson Valley Reckoning,” is part of a moment of genealogical truth-telling — about race, our country’s past and the hard truths in our own family trees — that has begun to reshape Americans’ stories. The moment is fueled by the popularity of ancestry research and consumer DNA testing, by personal-history TV shows like “Finding Your Roots,” and by a push within education and other public spheres to undertake an honest reexamination of our country’s beginnings.
Bruno, who grew up in the 1960s, knew that her mother’s family in New York dated to the 1600s. She thought of her heritage as “practically a symbol of all that is uniquely American … a mixture of old families and just-off-the-boat immigrants.” But later in life, she began to wonder about the “old families,” who were Dutch and had settled near Coxsackie. “Of course,” she realized, “if my Dutch family had been in this country for so long — for longer than it’s been a country, after all — there must be something interesting. Maybe a connection to a president, say, Martin Van Buren or one of the Roosevelts.”
(Three Hills) What she found was far more complicated. It began with the suggestion by a historian friend: “If you have Dutch ancestors in the Hudson Valley, they were probably enslavers.” Bruno was incredulous. “Slavery in the North? This was news to me. My first reaction was defensive. Not my family, I said.”
I stopped short when I read this, given what I thought was broad awareness of the institution’s existence in the colonies and early years of our republic, North and South. But, Bruno tells us, “few people I encountered knew the story of New York slavery.”
How do you reconstruct the past when so much of it has been effaced? This is Bruno’s task in “Reckoning.”
The book is not only a genealogical inquiry and a history of slavery in the mid-Hudson Valley, but also an excavation of the carefully constructed cultural fiction that paints the North as an innocent bystander to America’s original sin. Bruno eventually learned that slavery was pervasive in her hometown and her many family branches, propped up by the widespread involvement of so many more — the wealthy New Yorkers whose income was tied to the cotton trade; the legislature that clung to its slavery laws longer than many other nearby states.
The Coxsackie Record of Free Born Slaves. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum)
Bruno found a research partner and eventual friend in a Boston-area retiree named Eleanor Mire, who connected with her through a Facebook group dedicated to bringing together descendants of the enslaved and their enslavers. Exchanging ancestral surnames and hometowns, the two women realized that Mire is descended from people owned by Bruno’s ancestors. They were stunned to have discovered each other. Each had the knowledge, passion and vested interest to help solve the other’s ancestral puzzle. They may also be related through the darkest of circumstances — the rape of Mire’s enslaved ancestor — though attempts to definitively prove their genetic connection underscore the difficulties that Black Americans face in discovering their own roots after hundreds of years of displacement and erasure.
Census records, letters, wills and local history books offer rich documentation of Bruno’s family while giving the barest of facts about the lives and fates of those they owned, who — when they are named at all — are often referred to by first name only. But the women found that even a first name can, in the luckiest of circumstances, be an important clue when matched with others — like an enslaver’s will, a newspaper ad seeking a runaway enslaved person or Mire’s family stories about a long-ago blond, blue-eyed Dutch American forebear.
Eleanor Mire in the stacks of Vedder Research Library in Coxsackie, N.Y. (Debra Bruno)
The women were most intrigued by Mary Vanderzee, the matriarch from whom Mire is descended. Mary was born around 1802, during what Bruno describes as a “a bizarre twilight period of slavery in New York” between 1799 and 1827, when children born to enslaved mothers had to serve as indentured servants for about 20 years before they were free, placing some in bondage well past the state’s official end of slavery in 1827. (A local registry of these children acknowledged their oxymoronic legal status by calling them “Free Born Slaves.”) Mary Vanderzee bore four children while in bondage, starting around age 13, and DNA results as well as Mire’s family remembrances suggest that the father of her children was likely one of her enslavers.
Vanderzee’s story exists in bits and pieces, from which Bruno and Mire can only infer the desperation of her loved ones to save her. When Vanderzee was nearing the end of her teens, her father purchased his own freedom at the same time she stopped having babies. Mire and Bruno suspect that her father “may have used his leverage as a free man to extract his daughter from a household — and the White man who was impregnating her,” Bruno writes.
“Reckoning,” which began as an article in The Washington Post Magazine, is thick with such stories of enslaved people exerting their agency in any way they could. There are stories of sabotage, escape through disguise and fighting for the loyalists during the Revolutionary War in hopes of gaining freedom. There are not one but two stories of women who sued for their freedom — and won. The records of these lives, while maddeningly incomplete, are nevertheless so rich and riveting that they raise the question: How could so many Americans be unaware of them?
Using her hometown and experiences as an example, Bruno set out to unravel how her pocket of the North created a revisionist history of its role in slavery, in much the same way the South rewrote the Civil War as a fight for states’ rights. Consulting diaries, letters and literature, she found that whitewashing was integral to the way many New Yorkers regarded their involvement in slavery even as it was going on. “I think I have never seen people so happy in servitude as the domestics” of Albany, wrote one memoirist of the Colonial era, using a euphemism for the enslaved. Bruno notes that the end of New York slavery, momentously marked in a Black-owned newspaper, was barely acknowledged by White ones.
Concerted silence on such a grand scale requires the complicity of countless people, in generation after generation. It requires, for instance, that one’s high school education completely omit mention of slavery in New York, as Bruno’s did in the early 1970s. It requires that the educational plaques of a historic house not mention the slavery that took place inside its walls because the topic isn’t “kid friendly.” It requires that the “Old Slave Burying Ground” that Bruno discovered on an ancient map be thoroughly erased from the landscape, the easier to be transformed into farmland or power lines.
At times I grew frustrated with the incredulity of Bruno’s tone in “Reckoning.” It is one thing to write of one’s childhood that “if I learned anything at all about slavery, I learned that our country’s original sin belonged in the South,” but quite another to pass so many decades without correcting it. For many Black Americans, after all, Northern slavery was never a surprise. But such ignorance is bigger than any one person. It’s the product of a lot of work, and of a culture that teaches that Whiteness is the default and that White Americans don’t need to engage with the issue of race.
Debra Bruno (Bob Cullen)
When Bruno began researching the Dutch colonists from whom she’s descended, she had no knowledge that her ancestors enslaved other humans — no knowledge, indeed, that slavery was a major force in her home state. Her surprise at this revelation demonstrates the breadth of what much of America has chosen not to know, and the work needed now to uncover the truth. There’s something deeply moving about Bruno and Mire, descendant of the enslaver and descendant of the enslaved, working together to gain a clear-eyed view of their shared history. As Mire writes in an afterward to “Reckoning,” it is through this partnership that “our families are coming together, full circle, in us.” Libby Copeland is a former staff writer for The Washington Post and the author of “The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are.” A Hudson Valley Reckoning Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family By Debra Bruno Three Hills. 304 pp. $32.95 Share 4 Comments A note to our readers We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.