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o Some Conclusions: Vulnerable Spaces Identities and memories are not things we think about but things we think with. —John Gillis, quoted in Blight, Beyond the Battlefield While scholarship on urban black communities and identities is ubiquitous , rural areas have been so understudied that we cannot make generalizations about them. This story adds not only to our knowledge of rural black history but also to little-studied contacts between rural blacks and whites.¹ Through intimate stories of small places we can start to understand real people, such as these Hill families, who often created their own way of living in their biracial community despite a racist culture . By doing labor-intensive research on a small geographic area like the Hill, historians can uncover real, complex relationships among individuals and between groups. That is the beauty and the worth of this type of history. Uncovering how people of the past have struggled to live together day-to-day can help us as we struggle with the same issues today. This is just the beginning of a more complex understanding of our rural and biracial history. This story demonstrates that despite the relatively low numbers of African-descended people throughout Vermont during the antebellum period, there were higher percentages in many places in the state including this rural hillside.² An examination of where the spouses of the Hill people originated also uncovers a widespread network that reached into many areas of the state, as well as into New England, New York, Canada , and the South. Draping this once invisible network of people of color over our traditional histories stimulates us to rethink the past and modify the stories we tell about ourselves. The history of the Peters, Edwards, Waters, Clark, Langley, Williams , and Freeman families, will help to eliminate the idea advanced Some Conclusions o 155 by some historians, that only “scattered and isolated African American families struggled quietly (in rural areas) to survive the harsh realities of their hard-won freedom.”³ In the past, there has been little room for successful black settlers in the images or written histories of white Yankees who battled the northern wilderness and built nineteenth-century farming communities. It is past time to return them to the historical terrain they occupied. Expanding our traditional histories to include these rural farmers reminds us that our heroic past includes people of color who successfully negotiated a racialized society and passed their knowledge and skills for doing so on to the next generations. It also shows us how vulnerable their situations were. They may have overcome to some extent the racial injustices of the eras in which they lived, but disappointment always seemed to follow. Despite the revolutionary generation’s hopes of an increasingly better world for their children, the second generation was left trying to hold back a flood of rising racism. By the third generation , they still remembered the past of their grandparents, but their lives turned tragic as the community at the top of the Hill crumbled and the Peterses’ land dwindled. Not even their bravery in the Civil War was remembered and celebrated. Many felt betrayed by their country once again, and some of the descendants of the Hill farmers retreated into whiteness to protect themselves. One aspect of their lives that that eludes determination is how much rural racism they encountered on a daily basis. Their apparent acceptance on the frontier and cross-racial relations on the Hill make this a complicated endeavor. Historian Elizabeth Bethel discussed the “undelivered democratic freedom” in the country between the Revolution and the Civil War.4 However, it appears it was delivered in some small, out of the way places like this Hill, because a few people insisted on it. The founding mothers and fathers of the Hill lived through times of constantly resisting dehumanization to episodes of exhilarating freedom to putting their stake in the ground and risking the hazards of life on the Hill alongside their white neighbors. All the while they insisted on an equal chance in life as they helped build new cultural ideals in their neighborhood on the Hill. It might have been easier for a small minority to create such a place. White people of the time, fearful of revenge for the brutality of slavery, often imagined all sorts of terrifying things attached to people of color, but this small group may have posed no foreseeable threat to them. [3.142.98.108] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 18:49 GMT...

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