gaggle of chattering teenaged kids bearing hedge clippers and
machetes.
My newfound cousin swiped an arm across her forehead, then spotted me and waved.
“This is Madeline,” she said, rattling off the names of her crew.
It was cooler in the shade, but my face had started pouring sweat now that I’d stopped moving. I took a bandanna out of my pocket and folded it narrow to tie around my forehead, Deadhead style.
“There’s a big jug of ice water in the chapel,” Cate said. “Let’s grab some before I put you to work.”
I blinked when we came back out into the glare, following her past an enclosed rectangle of headstones, its shin-high rails held aloft by a squat granite obelisk at each corner.
“Was everything that overgrown when you started?” I asked, looking back at the cool wall of green behind us.
“Solid vegetable matter,” she said. “It’s taken us the whole summer to get this much cleared. The final burial was in nineteen fifty-four—I suspect that’s the last time anyone tried weeding.”
At the chapel door Cate fished a big wad of keys from her pocket and started sorting through them.
I looked above the iron fence as an elevated train screeched by along its Great-Wall course of tired concrete.
Kate fitted a key into the padlock, popping it open with a rough twist.
“It must have been beautiful. The whole city,” I said, “before there was any city.”
“You’d have been able to see all the way down to the water from here. The old villagers picked a magnificent place in which to honor their dead.”
Impossible to picture: no buildings or asphalt, just foot trails winding through beach plum and shadbush beneath Long Island’s great green canopy, connecting sparkling ponds and white beaches, cornfields and oyster beds, wildflower meadows and beaver dams.
We entered the shade inside the chapel, our steps echoing back from its stone walls and floor. Cate poured out two Dixie cups of cold water and handed one to me.
“We just found a headstone the kids are excited about,” said Cate. “One of the slave graves.”
I told her I’d like to see it too, and we put our cups in a trash bag and headed back outside.
Cate started walking toward the thicker growth and I followed, Indian file, behind her.
Stones peeked out of thinner brush near the trail, markers for loads of people to whom Cate and I were related: Townsends and Ludlams, Seamans and Underhills.
Beyond that were old New York names I knew only from street signs and arboretums: Lefferts, Wyckoffs, Boerums.
I paused next at the grave of one Elias Baylis:
For his love of liberty he fell a victim to British cruelty and tho’ blind was imprisoned in New York in Sep. 1776 and was released only in time to breathe his last in the arms of his daughter while crossing the Brooklyn ferry. During his confinement he was accustomed to sing the 142nd Psalm.
Near that was a smaller, cruder stone, on which was written, Our Babie. The two words were so uneven and faint that I pictured a young father incising each letter with his own tools, unable to afford the local gravesmith.
Cate was a few yards ahead. I caught up and we stepped over a pile of vines and a tree’s knuckled roots.
She pointed to a white marble headstone centered in the dell beyond, its surface jaded with moss:
Jane Lyons, a colored woman, who upwards of 65 years was a faithful and devoted domestic in the family of James Hariman, Sr. of this village, died Dec. 19, 1858. Age 75 years
I touched the numerals commemorating her year of death.
“When was slavery abolished in New York, anyway?” I asked.
“Eighteen twenty-seven,” answered Cate.
“So they owned her first, and then she stayed on.”
“Where else could she have gone?”
I knew better than to think all slave-holding guilt fell on my southern brethren—that our racial history was a sweet Underground-
Railroad rosebed of “Kumbaya” singalongs with Harriet Tubman waving the conductor’s baton—but I hadn’t realized it was a mere three decades before Lincoln that Abolition prevailed in my home state.
“At least they had the decency to record her name,” I said. “The ones in our cemetery just have blank leaves of slate shoved into the grass—head and foot. Like all that mattered was making sure you didn’t dig up a slave by accident.”
It made me want to walk up to random black people on the street and apologize.
“Let me get to work,” I said.
Cate led me back up the trail and gave me clippers and a machete.
“There are definitely a