Strangled Stones

Surveying a Plantation Era Cemetery

Walking along the concrete tomb of the Dutch Village of New Utrecht, I look through the rusty wire fencing, ten feet tall yet unable to prevent clothes, trash and beer bottles from being slung into its precinct by the undermen who skulk about. Walking the three sides of the two-acre perimeter, bounded on the fourth by a modern church, it is difficult to envision this land before it was sheathed in concrete, asphalt and brick.

However, hope does spring infernal, as one notes the great oaks and some lesser tries having taken hold recently and of old.

This cemetery, in the bowels of Brooklyn, occupies the site of a church raised by the Dutch in 1700, a generation after their conquest by the English, on the site of the long gone village. This site was witness to the death of American General Nathaniel Woodhull on September 20, 1776. According to the historical plaque, this site is only of interest due to the British-American clash of arms nearby. The true origin of this resting place of the dead, like all things American, is shrouded in mystery, intentionally ignored, nothing in the record to evince a curiosity as to the settling of this place, the mention of New Utrecht made as if the Dutch had lived in this place since the beginning of time.

The 52 full and partial rows of gravestones suggest the interment of perhaps a thousand.

Fully a third are fallen or otherwise destroyed.

A number of monuments to leading men are apparent—all unread, for the gates are locked against the subhumans who perhaps toppled the 18-foot obelisk of some tons into the church wall, barely scraping it.

The church itself hosts three congregations: one black, one Chinese, one Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu.

The precinct stretches from the walls of the church where the great are interred, to a lonely bank, held together by the roots of a great tree, engulfing one tiny headstone, the size of a Bible, made of clean white rock, seemingly being dragged under by the roots swarming it like a sea monster a ship.

As I kick aside the dried dog shit at my boot toes and the bleak clouds of today roll in overhead, I look around to see people just as alien to those who planted this village of the dead as they were to those they took it from.

Perhaps the Chinese are right to speak of us as Ghost-people.

Although the Dutch of New Amsterdam who settled this site in 1652 owned whites, only the burials of unfree blacks are recorded today.

Consider though, that in 1680, in New York, Peter Sluyter and Jasper Danckaerts described a master making his dying white slave dig his own grave (see page 134).

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(c) 2018 James LaFond, photos by Mescaline Franklin