White people came to Brooklyn to tour the “faithfully recreated plantation.” They sang along to Negro spirituals and took refreshment as they watched Black people, free Black people, pretend to be slaves.Īfter I stumbled onto that article, Brooklyn history became a refuge for me.

Nothing stays buried in this city, though. People bury the parts of history they don’t like, pave it over like African cemeteries beneath Manhattan skyscrapers. As if slavery was something that happened down there, even though there were enslaved Africans building, planting, and harvesting in colonial Brooklyn alongside the Dutch. The North does not remember in fact, the North has a super-selective fucking memory. It was the “those of the North” part that really annoyed me. I mean, I too get nostalgic when an eighties jam starts playing on the radio, but these motherfuckers really needed to reminisce about owning humans? Not the label politicians use to place our concerns into a neat box full of worries they don’t have to attend to immediately or ever, but an actual, tangible place-a slavery theme park that’d opened in Brooklyn at the end of the nineteenth century.īlack America, the theme park, was billed as “an opportunity to become familiar with plantation life for those of the North who belong to a generation to which the word slavery has but an indefinite and hazy meaning.” This was, like, twenty years after slavery ended, mind you.

Last fall, on a night when my ass was getting well acquainted with the uncomfortable guest chair in Mommy’s hospital room, I’d numbly tapped and swiped my way to an article about a place called Black America.

When no one is watching alyssa