Slavery before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884

6. Unimagining Communities

6 / Unimagining Communities Artifacts, unseen archives, and anecdotal histories thus act to introduce doubt, to disrupt the grand narratives of race. They await our willingness to see them and our ability to recognize them as ruptures. If we give attention to the haunting figures and conspicuous historical silences and juxtapose those silences with the reconstructed archaeological facts and the unremarked archival materials, then could we reassemble different stories? In my own narrative, I have tried to focus on the many elisions, failures to record or preserve, selective silences, outright destructions, and narrative erasures that have rendered us unable to gain a clear perspective on the plantation at Sylvester Manor. When these issues are presented with the archaeological material—the abandoned materiality of the plantation—we are able to see traces of what other stories might have been. But even our new interpretations will slide into the racialized historical episteme that has been constructed around the colonial and plantation foundations of the United States if we do not attend to the ongoing effects of racial discourse to contemporary perspectives. In many ways, this is not a story about race; rather, it is a story about how race came to shape the way histories were and are told. It is a story told not just by the amateur or local white historians but also by scholars and descendants of all the plantation residents. There is a difference, however, in why. Such narratives are not just passive reflections; instead, they bring coherence to a sense of identity for the authors and their readers. My concern here is not just how social memory is created, but how exclusion and forgetting are crucial aspects of that creation. Certain 164 / unimagining communities remnants of the past are either ignored as sources or are even later redacted or reshaped when communities deem them inappropriate for the story they want to tell about themselves. It may seem paradoxical to investigate the absences, silences, or substitutions of forgetting, for indeed if forgetting is successful we should never know. But social memory, constructed among networks of people and often embedded in materiality, is an entangled sense of history, with redundant and conflicting versions that are often quite difficult to eradicate completely. This is not to say that the remnants are clear perspectives on the past, if even there were a single “past.” But the evidence we have of the Shelter Island plantation certainly exceeds the narratives told by local nineteenth-century historians, especially when we expand our concepts of what constitutes historical evidence. Hints and traces--from the ground, from the little-used corners of the archives and oral histories, and even embedded within those local histories--inscribe a shape to what was either forgotten or never imagined as history to begin with. What stories might be otherwise told about the plantation, if not the one comprised of racialized actors? In other words, what is at stake if race is not used to characterize separate communities? Alternative narratives Perhaps the most evident story is about class inequalities and labor. We forget that what the Sylvesters created in the plantation population was a majority disenfranchised labor force, significantly outnumbering their own family. At a minimum, the twenty-three enslaved Africans and African Americans accounted at Nathaniel’s death in 1680 were twice the family’s number, but the proportion tipped more dramatically by factoring in both the Manhanset on the island and perhaps additional white indentured servants. Maintaining social control and hierarchical order was likely a constant concern to the Sylvesters who were surrounded by the disenfranchised: on the one hand, Africans had been forcibly transported across the Atlantic and subjected to the brutality of work on a Barbados sugar plantation, and their children had been born into enslavement; on the other hand, the Manhanset had been displaced by the Sylvesters and seen their landscape radically altered, and their quiet presence and labor was continually predicated upon provision of goods and protection. Both Manhanset and enslaved Africans were not so isolated from the wider world that they did not hear of discontent and anger amongst Eastern Algonquians in the buildup to King Phillip’s unimagining communities / 165 War, prompted by conflicts over land. The Manhanset and Montaukett were noted particularly in colony court records for having maintained communications with the Narragansett in this period (Fernow 1883, 14: 697). These were likely frightening prospects to the Sylvesters, who must have...