by Tim Gilmore
“The grave-yard where several hundred slaves were buried in the old plantation days,” said a Harper’s New Monthly Magazine story in November 1878, “was between the house and the Negro quarters, and is now ploughed over, and yields heavy crops.”
Not 30 years later, Hannah Rollins referred in a 1904 letter to “tabby quarter houses, 36 in half circle beginning to decay,” when her father, John Rollins, four years after the Civil War, moved the family to the old Kingsley Plantation, first built for John McQueen in the 1790s. Rollins tried to make a living off grapes and oranges, and when that failed, to build a hotel and subdivide the island for real estate.
Hannah’s letter continued: “9 [formerly enslaved] families remained—a swarm of children [indecipherable] open sandy road to house from quarters except large oak—under it a still visible darky graveyard.”
The crops that Harper’s said Rollins harvested on top of graves are now long gone, but that live oak remains, a witness tree, hundreds of years old, a living connection to the human lives long ago inhabiting this place.
The small limestone “tabby” houses of the enslaved remain almost by accident. Mid-20th century preservers of Kingsley Plantation discussed demolishing the old slave quarters, perhaps building a golf course here. The quarters and plantation house with its outbuildings came to the National Park Service on different lots to preserve the structures of the owners and the possibility of redeveloping the land where lived, and were buried, the owned.
Throughout the 20th century, the persistence of the slave quarters begged the question of where those Africans enslaved were buried. Eventually the academic narratives seemed to care.
A “witness tree” is a direct living link to history. People regularly seek out the awe that accompanies the realization of standing on the very site where some great historical event occurred, where some prominent character in the grand drama that shaped our world once stood.
Famous witness trees include cherry trees on D.C.’s Tidal Basin, the Southern Magnolia planted by Andrew Jackson, as depicted on the $20 bill, and the Oklahoma City Survivor Tree, at the site of right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing that killed 168 people, including 19 children in daycare, and injured 680.
“In the secrecy of the quarters and the seclusion of the brush arbors (‘hush harbors’) the slaves made Christianity their own,” by syncretizing it with residual indigenous African traditions, writes Albert Raboteau in his 2004 book Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South.
“These clandestine meetings were typically held under a tree believed to have spiritual or protective powers,” writes Amani T. Marshall in his 2022 study The Enslaved Communities on Fort George Island.
While frequently the layouts on plantations were panoptic,
designed for maximum supervision of the enslaved by overseers at all times, Dan Schafer argues in his 2013 book on Zephaniah Kingsley, “The building complex at Kingsley’s plantation symbolically evokes images of circular Wolof villages,” like the one Kingsley’s child slave and later wife Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye, renamed Anna Kingsley, would have known in her earliest years in what’s now Senegal. Wolof villages, Marshall writes, “were organized in family compounds, containing multiple homes, granaries, and outbuildings facing an open area in the center, surrounded by a circular wall.”
The Witness Tree stands like the North Star to the crescent of the quarters. Between them, enslaved Africans met and talked, before the dawn of the workday, and in their rare free hour made music, then fixed food when the sun dipped beyond digging and planting and building and harvesting and perhaps the occasional symbolic sacrifice.
Beginning in 2006, archaeologist James Davidson, with the University of Florida, field-tested the grounds between the tree and the cabins. He found the graves. Archaeologists found blue bead “offerings,” pieces of iron used “to ward against evil” and egg-shaped stones used in fertility rituals.
In the entrance to one cabin, labeled W-15, they found an “intact and fully articulated chicken (skeleton), along with an in situ egg, an iron/laterite concretion, and a single glass bead.” Beneath the tabby floor of the sugar mill, built in the late 1700s or early 1800s, they found a young pig. Davidson argues the hen may have been a sacrifice to the Yoruba god Esu, known also in the Americas as Legba, mediator between humans and gods.
They found six slave burials, with but “few artefacts,” and a greater awareness of just how much they don’t know. How many enslaved people are buried out from the Witness Tree, in mind of the “several hundred” Harper’s numbered in 1878, no one knows. The burials seem to date from between 1800 and 1850, each in a coffin apparently hexagonal and fitted to the body.
All bodies but one were buried facing east. Perhaps they were laid in the earth facing Mecca, as Islam decrees, since African indigenous cultures had syncretized Islam before slave ships left Africa for America. Perhaps, as in later African American graves, they were buried facing the coming of the archangel Gabriel, sounding his trumpet for “the Great Gettin’-Up Morning.”
There were graves marked with seashells, buried themselves by the land rising through time. Lightning whelks rare here, but consistent, Marshall points out, with Kongo-Angola cosmology. Cargo manifests for Kingsley’s Africans include people purchased from, Marshall notes, “Senegal, Gambia, the Rio Pongo region of modern Guinea, the Bight of Biafra on the coast of present-day Nigeria, Angola, Kenya, and Tanzania.” Enslaved people in Kingsley’s possession bore such African names as Abdalla, Bonify, Comba, Couta, Jenoma, Penda, Qualla, Tamasa, Tamba and Yamba.
In his 2018 report, James Davidson writes that in his personal and archaeologically informed imagination, “I most often envisioned the people who inhabited these cabins, not their broken plates and buttons and beads,” that he tried to picture them “as they were, the sum of their lives, their amazing ability to maintain African identities, and to wrest dignity from oppressive and brutal times.”
