Excerpt – Debra Bruno

I can’t change history, but I can explain where I belong in this history.

Having a genetic and ancestral link to America’s original sin as well as

having the time and ability to tell the story makes it my responsibility. So far,

I’ve counted twenty of my family names who were enslavers, from Bronk to

Vosburgh. It feels almost biblical. The Bible says that God “visits the iniquity

of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the

fourth generation.” When I sang those words in my chorus’s performance of

Mendelsohn’s oratorio “Elijah,” I got chills. We are not humans who popped

out of nowhere to live in this complicated America; we are people who have

inherited the sins of our fathers and the traumas of our ancestors. They

touch us as absolutely as I touched the shards of stone jutting from the earth

in the Bronk cemetery.

It is not just my inheritance. I got into an argument not long ago with

an acquaintance who believed that my family had been rich. Since hers was

not, she seemed to want to keep any responsibility for reckoning with slavery

at arm’s length. Even though it was true that any white person who had a

family history in this country that went back far enough was likely to find a

story of enslavers, she had missed the point. The point was about complicity.

To know the beauty of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

is to accept that only some people have fully benefited from their promises.
To deny that and to distance ourselves from that truth is to misunderstand

how our country grew, prospered, and exists today.

I’m changed. I see now that my vision had been clouded with the

blurry haze of simplistic history. My lens now makes it impossible for me to

see my nation’s story without the overlay of slavery. Now I look at every old

house and think: Where did the enslaved live? The older the house, the more

I ask whether humans shivered in the basement or sweated in the attic,

whether they rested in the room behind the stairs. I pick my way through the

stones and paths of old cemeteries and think, who took the trouble to mark

the births and deaths of the enslaved people? Are they buried there in

unmarked graves, or were they pushed to the far outskirts of a town? How

many ploughs and backhoes have turned up bones that were quietly tossed

to the side? How many people were deprived the honor of a headstone? At

Curaçao, I could look out at the sea and imagine the Africans who were about

to set foot on sandy soil for the first time since they left Africa. Now I carry

my conjuring to my home.

I’ve had to rethink my dual role of both an outsider and a native

daughter. When I was growing up in my large family, I created space to

breath by devouring chapter books and creating imaginary worlds in my

backyard. I had a “fort” that I built out of a discarded wooden pallet, likely
tossed there by the tides of the Hudson. I had my tree near the river that I

climbed so I could stare at the river’s changing colors. I was comfortable,

mostly happy, but it was like living inside a quilted box, soft but muffled. I

left for college, and the world expanded. When I came back to visit, I started

seeing my beloved and boring Athens from the lens of an outsider.

On the wrenching day that my brother and I had to choose a casket for

my father’s funeral, the funeral director asked me where I lived. I told him I

lived in Washington, D.C. “Well, look at YOU,” he said. It was as if I was

putting on airs, the automatic black mark against the person who left. But

even though I felt like an outsider, I knew I was still belonged there. There

was the house where my father was born. There was the former convent

where I babysat a sweet little boy named Gregory. There was the church

where my 4-H club learned to “Suds Your Duds.” I could never be a stranger

here in this safe and claustrophobic place.

That sense of belonging began to shift when I started learning about

slavery and filling in the missing blanks of the enslaved in Athens. The first

moment of dissonance was so unreal that I could have convinced myself I

was reading about Athens, Greece, or a fairy tale place called Loonenburg.

The comfortable ordinariness of Athens’ streets and houses didn’t line up

with these facts of slavery or its aftermath.

 When I started looking into the history of the 20 th century in my

hometowns, I found a 1903 story of a near-lynching in New Baltimore.

“Assaults by Negro Fiends”i told of a 19-year-old Black man named James

Little who asked some girls picking berries by the side of the road whether

they had anything to eat. When one of them went to find her mother, Little

allegedly assaulted 11-year-old Emma Cole and tried to drag her into the

woods. The girl’s friend returned to the spot and the man ran off, but he was

soon apprehended and confessed to the attack, said one report. “In the

meantime news of the capture reached New Baltimore and a mob of 15

enraged farmers started for Coxsackie…all frankly avowing their intention to

lynch the negro,” the newspaper said. They wanted vigilante justice.

A sheriff’s deputy, “realizing that the coming of darkness would mean

the breaking of the flimsy local lockup and the violent death of his prisoner,

smuggled the negro out and took him down the river on the boat to Catskill,

where there is a well built jail,” a newspaper reported. ii The next day, when

Little was taken from Catskill and arraigned before a justice in New

Baltimore, the mob reappeared. The girl’s father “was in an excited state and

as the boat docked drew a revolver.”iii His gun was taken away before he

could shoot. Later that year, Little pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty

years in Clinton prison, nearly 200 miles north of New Baltimore. iv We will
never learn the true story of what happened that day. One report noted that

the child “is seriously injured, but may recover,” while a different newspaper

said, “the favorable condition of the assaulted child has somewhat allayed

the excitement.” My grandmother, Edna Collier, was born in nearby

Coxsackie just two years after that incident. Emma Cole could have been her

cousin. My grandfather, Orrin Van Valkenburg, was a four-year-old boy when

that happened. He could have been there that day. The story was a few steps

closer to me now.

I came across a reference to a man named George Sylvester Nichols, v

who had owned a house on South Franklin Street in the village. vi Franklin

Street is one of the most elegant streets in Athens. My Italian grandmother

called it Easy Street, and it’s lined with enormous maple and oak trees as

well as some of the larger homes in the village. Nichols had fought in the

Battle of the Wilderness west of Fredericksburg, Virginia, during the Civil War.

That fact caught my eye because that was the battle where James Dunbar

Van Valkenburg, the Confederate officer, had captured an entire regiment of

Northern soldiers. Maybe, I thought, Nichols had been one of the captured

Union troops, and I wondered if Nichols was one of the “mortified” officers so

angry at Van Valkenburg’s ruse.

 Nichols’ Athens home had been built in 1803 by a man named Seth

Hamilton. Hamilton then sold it to Abraham Van Buskirk. vii This stopped me a

second time. Van Buskirk was the Athens man, a vestryman for Trinity

Episcopal Church, who had advertised for a runaway slave named Jim in

1811.

I looked up the address. [INSERT FIG. 22: VAN BUSKIRK HOUSE] I knew

the place. I jog by the house every time I visit Athens. On my next trip to

Athens, I had to go see it again. There it sat on the corner of Franklin and

Third streets, on a hill that sloped down to the Hudson in front of it. This

time, I stopped and stared for long enough that I’m surprised that curious

neighbors didn’t come out and ask me what I was doing. What had been in

my mind an old heap was now something different. Its layout is odd: the

entrance door is on the second floor, accessed by a rickety narrow porch that

looks as if it was added in more recent years. The lower level has its own

entrance door and I saw a light was on inside. I knocked; no one answered.

Many of the lower windows were close to the ground. I pictured Abraham Van

Buskirk and his family sitting around the fireplace on a winter’s evening in

the floor above as Jim, a lionskin coat wrapped around his body and his feet

slipping out of too-large boots, snuck away on that freezing February night.

Did he head north towards Coxsackie and eventual freedom in Canada? Or

did he run south in the direction of Catskill, looking for family and work in

New York City? Did he walk on the frozen Hudson? The Hudson River is a
block away from the house; he could have marched off in his too-large boots

on the slippery ice. Van Buskirk died in 1826,viii a year before slavery ended

in the state. In the 1820 census, he listed one slave and one free Black in his

household. I haven’t found his grave.

I spend a lot of time looking for the dead, asking to be haunted. Twice

in the last few years when I’ve jogged up Washington Street past Zion

Lutheran Church, I’ve tripped and executed a skidding fall, ripping skin on

my elbows and knees. Some say that Berkenmeyer is buried beneath the

church. Maybe that’s the only haunting I’ll get.

Maybe that haunting was from Pieter Christiaan, the Madagascar man

and freed slave who married two German women in Loonenburg. His home

was probably right there next to the river, like mine was. Did he miss the

warm climate of Madagascar? He was a child when he was stolen from his

land. He was braver than I’ve ever been: How could a former slave build a

life, sitting on the church council and then finally upending the community in

the 1740s by challenging the most powerful man in town? How could he

laugh at him and essentially drive him away from his fiefdom?
 Maybe my fall was a message from Pieter’s daughter Catharine, the

biracial woman who kept bearing babies she didn’t want. Had she been

raped? Life for a single woman with an infant meant a life of poverty and the

shame of having one more bastard. She wouldn’t have been able to keep

working with a tiny baby. What happened on that winter day when she

walked up the frozen Hudson with her newborn? What depths of despair

would drive a new mother to kill a newborn? And how could Zion church treat

almost certain infanticide with a gentle admonition to “improve”? The

community looked the other way. Pastor Berkenmeyer defended her, citing

his Christian faith as a reason for forgiveness. But maybe he was defending

the girl he impregnated.

I think often of Nancy Jackson, a woman as resilient as Mumbet

Freeman and Sojourner Truth. She was sold off with her baby and toddler to

an enslaver north of Coxsackie. Her children were sent away as indentured

servants front of her eyes. What happened to her son Jack, whose name was

crossed off the Coxsackie Register? Did he go with her to the family of John

LaGrange? What happened to her daughter Sarah, the one she was trying to

get settled? Sojourner Truth’s biographer said that if she had just stayed in

Kingston, her name might have been lost to history. ix

 Was it a triumph for Molly Van Slyke, the new Baltimore girl who won

the right to stay in New Baltimore with her two little children? What did she

do next? Where did they live? I found records of two Black men from New

Baltimore – Sylvanus and Samuel Van Slyke – who served in Colored Troops in

the Civil War. They could have been her sons, born in the years after she

returned to New Baltimore. I’ve put my hand on the sun-warmed stone of

Sylvanus’s headstone in Coxsackie’s Riverside Cemetery.

I imagine Tone Van Bergen standing in the crowd at Catskill’s

waterfront, straining to get a glimpse of the great Lafayette. I found a note

describing his son, the child he named Marquis Lafayette Van Bergen, in a

Van Bergen family history at Vedder library. Lafayette the American was

enormous. When he was asked to play the fiddle at the cornerstone-laying

for Albany’s state capitol building in 1871, he needed a proper outfit, so a

local seamstress stayed up all night to make him a new pair of pants. He

stood “6 feet 7 inches in his bare feet.” Other accounts said he was seven

feet tall and played for local square dances.

I can see Lon Van Valkenburg switching hats with his enslaver David

Abeel and telling him he is now the slave. I imagine Alexander Coventry’s

man Cuff coming home drunk after his extra few days off around Easter and

mouthing off about it.

 Eleanor and I often muse about how wonderful it would have been to

sit at the knee of Mary Vanderzee and hear her stories. She outlived much of

her family and was honored and celebrated in her New Baltimore community.

Would she have spoken with a Dutch accent, like Sojourner Truth? We think

she may have had several other children who didn’t survive. What did she

think when her father bought her sexual freedom? Did she, like Sojourner

Truth or Harriet Tubman, choose a new first name for herself? Would she

have told us she had had a happy life?

********

Mark Twain said that his understanding of the Mississippi River

changed once he learned how its currents were treacherous for navigation,

when he could sense that the rippling eddies just below its surface were

signs of navigational peril. When he became a pilot, “All the grace, the

beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!” he wrote. x To Twain,

his Mississippi had been reduced to a challenge, a question of how well he

could pilot the waters.

 My understanding of my Hudson River, whose restless waters gently

slap its muddy banks, is different too. The river changes by the hour as the

tides move water up and down and the currents pass each other heading

north and south, in a dance that caused the Native people to call it “the river

that runs two ways.”

Now I understand that of the many thousands of ways the river reflects

the sky, the winds, the currents, and the demi-monde of bald eagles, trout,

geese, and cranes that draw their sustenance from it, many other people

that I hadn’t imagined have gazed at the same scenery. The setting sun hits

the river reeds on the island that separates my portion of the river from its

eastern banks, lighting them in a golden band as if someone had aimed a

celestial spotlight just at that angle. Clouds light up the sky and become

Hudson River school pink and peach, giddy colors that the waters reflect. In

my eyes, it’s always been a beauty that transcends time and place.

As I pass by what had been the Collier flats, this long, fertile region

between the hills that roll down to the Hudson and the deep blue outline of

the Catskills off in the distance, I wonder if any of Eleanor’s ancestors, or

mine, looked at the river and mountains the way I do: the ever-changing

waters, one moment as still as glass, another moment choppy with

whitecaps. The mountains one moment hidden behind a cloudy haze,

another moment crisp and dark. Were these exquisite visions to them? Or did

the river represent a chance at freedom, a place to murder a baby, a

dangerous trap where they could be kidnapped? Did they see the mountains

as the giver of sunsets, sustenance, life?

All my life, I had the feeling that the river I faced every day was

heading south to my left and north to my right. I was wrong. I grew up on the

west side of the Hudson. When I looked at the river sparkling in the morning

light, north was to my left, south to my right. The direction I faced was east,

towards Massachusetts, with the Catskill Mountains at my back.

I’m not sure why I never got that right. If I could imagine slaves fleeing

north to Canada, I would have to think of them moving on the river from my

right to my left. If I could imagine it at all.

My internal GPS, which has served me well in the narrow hutongs of

Beijing and in the outer arrondissements of Paris, was somehow set wrong.

When it came to my sense of the Hudson River, my Hudson River, I had no

true north. Everything I thought was wrong.

i
“Assaults by Negro Fiends,” The Buffalo Times, Buffalo, N.Y., July 15, 1903, 10.
ii
“Deputy Sheriff Stole Prisoner Away from Mob,” The Buffalo News, Buffalo, N.Y. July 15, 1903, 7.
iii
“Father of the Child Drew a Revolver When Boat Arrived with the Prisoner,” The Buffalo Times, July 15, 1903, 10.
iv
“Catskill Negro Gets Twenty Years,” The Post-Star, Glens Falls, N.Y. Nov. 13, 1903. 5.
v
Pelletreau, History of Greene County, 193-194.
vi
Bicentennial Walking Tour of Athens – 2003, pamphlet;
https://sites.rootsweb.com/~nygreen2/bicentennial_walking_tour_of_athesn_2003.htm
vii
Pelletreau, History of Greene County, 194.
viii
Abraham Vanbuskirk, s.v. Record of Wills, 1665-1916; Index to Wills, 116-1923 (New York County); Surrogates Court;
New York, New York. Probated Feb. 15, 1826. Ancestry.com.
ix
Painter, Sojourner Truth, 24.
x
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, from chapter 9: Continued Perplexities; Project Gutenberg ebook:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm