Leslie King Hammond: The New York African Burial Ground and the Aesthetics of Sacred Space in African American Community

When I began to deal with sacred space in the African American community, I thought about it in the context of how spirituality was visualized within the African American ethos. We know that in the course of the African American experience religion was expressed through structured denominations and independently by individuals who had profound beliefs in an omnipotent power–God. My experience in dealing with art history is that of a discipline that I fell into backwards. I was born here in New York, went to Queens College, and got a BA in fine arts. But the idea of a doctorate intrigued me, because I also love art history and the idea of inquiry. As a child, I was most fascinated by archaeology. My mother said, "Oh this poor little colored girl is going to starve in a dusty pit somewhere." At that point, that was not a career objective. But my mother, who could not dissuade me from this passion, called the Museum of Natural History to ask if they had something I could do. She asked them not to pay me. They had a job in the geology department, where I spent two years while in high school sorting samples, which I loved. The only bad part was that at the end of the day, I had to walk through the museum at night by myself. The Hall of Dinosaurs terrified me every week. When the opportunity came up to do a doctorate, I said fine.

I found myself being compelled and drawn to the things I loved the most: making objects, inquiry and studying how people get from one conceptual point to another. What really fascinated me was how come my history was nowhere to be found. Why couldn't I find any models? Everytime I went to the library, I was looking for some kind of reference to my history. I started with archaeology and read everything on the shelf. Then I went to mythology, science fiction, earth science. In grad school, I was still looking and couldn't find anything. There were no books on the shelves. I started piecing together experiences, watching artists and looking at art. The civil rights Black Power movement and the women's movement were in vogue and I was watching artists respond to those issues. I thought something was going on here, something very different from the traditional Western cannon. I began to realize it had something to do with metaphysics, spirituality and space. I began to see artists moving off canvas, out of the studio to act out and shatter assumptions about what art was supposed to be.

I decided I had to understand where these concepts were coming from in their traditional African practice, and how they were intersecting with Eurocentric value systems. What I have come to understand in the research that I have been doing is that African Americans, as a result of the horrific experience of being an involuntary immigrant, created a very different structure and approach to how they perceived space. Space as it was understood in Africa was defined, specific and ordered. We had a very intrinsic understanding of what it was about and what it meant. Space had to do with land, God, and how Africans perceive themselves as at the center of their universe. Everyone in this room is the center of their own universe. When I teach my class in African American art, I always start with the body, because if you don't understand how Africans respect the body, you will miss completely what happens when they move out to locate, redefine, appropriate or sabotage space. Space is very complex concept for African Americans. I tell my students to locate their navel, make a cross–horizontal and vertical. That nexus is literally the center of your universe.

The slides will help to illustrate how African Americans had an abrupt, violent, painful separation from a space that was an ordered universe and culture. In the seventies I went to Africa. I was on a boat, near the coast of Senegal, going to Gorge Island. This island was a holding point for captured slaves who were then sorted, sized, aged and sexed in order to be shipped as cargo to the New World. I wanted to go through that space to see what it looked like. Now I am being rational but, at the time, I wasn't. I think it is important that you see that kind of space. Along this coast it was said that sharks lurked in the waters, conditioned to the plentiful source of food from those who died, were thrown out of the holding cells or Africans who leapt to their deaths. These were some of the interior places, the auction area, the holding cells. This would have held mature, child bearing women. If one of them got pregnant while imprisoned she could stay on the island. Often, when the traders were choosing their "stock", women were identified for sex, some became pregnant. Most were shipped. There were also small holding cells for children. Men were sorted by capability for breeding and work.

Why am I talking about these kinds of spaces? In the African context a negative space is as sacred as a positive space. We deal often with negative and positive energies. Negative is seen as a horizontal line, positive as a vertical. Those kinds of interstices direct how people feel about their space and what they do with it. This space on this island is a sacred space. The first time I went to it, I was with a group of African Americans and Jewish Americans. As these two groups walked through this space, it was the most moving, upsetting, wrenching experience. Everyone was crying. We were no good at the end of this experience. Rooms like this were where children were held. Children were aged by the number of their teeth, many did not survive. This door is the doorway to which the boats would pull up. Planks would be attached and Africans would be walked out. This would be the last image of Africa, their homeland, they would ever see again.

The boat trip was a dark, lonely, horrific experience. This photograph is from the 1860s of a slave ship with its "cargo." These are young people. The traders quickly realized that the older the African, the stronger the memory of African culture that was retained, and the slaves were more difficult to break, control and incarcerate. The younger the African, the easier to enslave and acculturate. It is important to understand what is a sacred space. Since we are going to be talking about the African burial ground, I thought it was important for you to look at an archeological site and understand the significance of this site. If you are going to deal with commemorating public areas and placing art in spaces that happen to be sacred, how do you know what sacred is? How do you define that kind of space?

This is the burial of a woman in the region of Zaire, which was an important region from which many Africans were brought to the United States, the Caribbean and South America. Her arms are crossed; she is wearing a necklace and a ring. There are many pots around the body. There is a preponderance of circular forms, which in part has to do with the continuity of life, domesticity with the needs of this woman in her other worldly life. Looking at the content of the vessels, we find they are filled with "stuff." Stuff is the "common," "ordinary" essentials of life. Stuff like food, personal objects, etc., have enormous energy and symbolism. We are conditioned in terms of African burial practices to look at the spaces of Egyptian tomb sculptures. We rank the importance and class of the person by the amount of burial goods. By anyone's estimation, this was a very important woman. Someone really cared about her, because they filled this space with artifacts of great personal and spiritual meaning.

Why is this important? As an artist, a community member, a politician, moving into an arena that is going to be commemorated, one of the difficulties in dealing with African American space is that nobody knew what was important to that cultural experience. No one knew how to make that determination. They didn't know that when you go into a space, what may appear to be ordinary or commonplace or mundane may be profoundly spiritual. In the past two decades, researchers and artists have been looking at spaces again from the traditional African perspective, so that when we get to the African American site we can begin to be more astute about what we are looking at.

Here is a burial site for a king in Zaire. Here the many pots are on top of the grave now. They are inverted and they are perforated with holes. In between all the pots are bottles, which had wine, beer, water and "stuff" in them. The next thing you notice is a tree with four trunks. We have four cardinal points: north, south, east, west. When you are in a green field in Ireland and you find a four leaf clover it is lucky. Four is special. If you found a tree with four branches like this, that was a special, sacred place. This is a sacred grove. That is the king's tree.

Africans now find themselves in the strange place called America, clueless, forced to create a new culture out of a plantation "society." The new Africans in America quickly understood that they could not "own" anything, including their own bodies. Native Americans were the first to occupy the land and white people owned and controlled everything. The only space that was safe to occupy was spiritual space... Easily projected and codified by systems of secrecy and information only known and shared by the disenfranchised African and African Americans.

This watercolor is very important because it documents plantation slave culture on Africanized American culture in the New World. In the rear of the painting we see the houses. In the middle is a broomstick, perhaps a wedding, and the people playing instruments, including an African drum. This is a photograph of the island of Martinique. My family migrated through the Caribbean. Barbados was a drop off point for African slaves who were then sent on to the United States. This is a burial yard in Martinique, with conch shells all over the graves. Shells are very important as objects and as signifiers. At this burial site in Barbados are a variety of objects–cowrie shells, dog teeth. A slave had only partial memory of traditions from Africa. For a slave to have any personal artifacts tells us something about their prestige, identity and forms of resistance. In most sites, material such as cloth had disintegrated. In this site, they also found a number of pipes, which are also signifiers and symbols of respect, status and achievement.

This is Baltimore, Maryland. The Carroll Mansion Estate belonged to an old Maryland family. When they were excavating the property a few years ago, someone pulled up the floorboards of the house and found this cache of objects. Most unusual were these crystals and a pottery shard with a star. Shards with stars or Xs are called Collono ware. We know that many Africans who came to this region were from the Kongo and Angola regions. Kongo culture had a complex system of patterning and marking on their bodies, hair, teeth and clothing using symbols of stars, spirals, diamonds and X's. Scholars began to ask if these things had to do with divination and spiritual beliefs. Archeologists have found many crystals, buttons, rocks, beads. This is the "stuff" again. "Stuff" keeps coming up in places were African people are buried.

A woman in South Carolina around the 1890s, wearing a seagrass basket on her head, is defining her space. Her dress has a double belt at the waist and at the pelvis. When she was placed in her grave with this double belt, the belt would not have survived, so the photograph provides important information about how people redefined the culture they were forced to live in. In this instance, the women in many African countries used the belt as a symbol of marriageability. This was an element of prestige, self esteem and beauty.

In Georgia, photographers were assigned during the WPA to document the interviews being conducted by writers. Some went to this graveyard and photographed it. No one paid attention until the 1960s when Robert Ferris Thompson looked at this unusual gravesite. These are poor blacks buried in a remote area of Sunbury, Georgia. Here is a bird form, a human form, a snake made out of the natural branch of the wood with an X in the belly. Cyrus Bowens has commemorated the grave of his deceased mother and father. Over the grave is a slab of concrete which is very unusual. In the concrete is a pitcher that belonged to his mother. The bird is a symbol of resurrection or a conduit between the living and God. He commemorated his father's grave with concrete and a headlight from a car, to light the way to the other world.

In Sunbury, Georgia, in the 1980s, in another slab of concrete across the face of the grave, is a radio in front. All these aspects of material culture make you think about how we use objects in daily life. Here is a simple grave from the Carolinas, with a diamond in the concrete. These were forms of resistance that African Americans could execute while the dominant culture was left clueless about their symbolism. It was a secret, encoded system that had traveled through history. We can now connect these to songs, to poetry, to practices and religious belief systems.

Here are four trees in Mississippi in 1990. Someone was buried and pottery was placed on top. This is someone's backyard. Before you think about it as a mess, look at the organization. There are a lot of chairs with four legs. There are a lot of pots. He has clustered all these artifacts around that tree. It is a sacred space. The chairs are thrones.

Then there are spaces in the South that seem like never-never land. Why are all these plates hanging off trees like that? Where did all these bottles come from? What is this bottle tree? This is about warding off negative elements, keeping space safe, trapping negative energy in the bottles. It also says something about the paucity of materials that are available to a certain community to make more permanent artifacts, and about the shrewd inventiveness of people who have great need to express themselves.

This could be anywhere: tire rims. In African American communities, we take tire rims and make planters out of them. It is the same impulse as the gravesites. One of the most stirring examples of the discovery of "stuff" is the identification and the articulation of how space is enclosed and made personal. James Hampton would walk through the streets of Washington, D.C. with a little red wagon and pick up found objects and aluminum foil. He took them back to a garage and worked for years. He died with no will. When the landlord went to rent it again, he found this. It is called the Throne of the Nation's Third Millennium General Assembly. I don't know what it means, but when you walked into this space and looked at this assemblage of thrones and altar tables and crowns, you understand that James Hampton was making a heaven, a new heaven for a new order of religion that he was creating. In the center it says, Fear Not.

In 1991, downtown New York, near here on Broadway, they are digging for another GSA building. They find bodies buried on the site. In the New York Historical Society, eighteenth century maps reveal a site called the Negros' Burial Ground. History records that New York had active slavery, with perhaps 25% of the population being of African origin. These individuals could not be buried in the church plots. This land was designated for them. It is approximately five city blocks, or five acres. As a result of this site, marked with rocks, they found there were bodies that had not been touched. Here is a burial of a woman. In the crook of her arm is her baby. The graves were three to four deep. This is burial 340, one of the most incredible finds, of a woman who had a pelvis ornamentation with 147 beads. How a woman at that time had that many beads is a story we may never know, but it tells that she was an important individual and that she was respected in her community.

An enormous battle arose over the 440 remains of individuals in the one plot that was to be covered by another new federal building. It is estimated that there are 20,000 individuals buried at this site. This is the largest archeological site on the continental land mass of the U.S. This discovery will irrevocably change the nature of how we look at American history, how we do archaeology, and how we interpret sacred sites.

Now we will look at 17 minutes of a 60-minute video, so you can see what this site looks like and what some of the problems were. Then I will talk about what happened in the process, and how artists were asked to come in and deal with the commemoration of the site. I will show you the entries, and then I will end with the artists who have been selected to complete the project.

VIDEO 41 - 249

After the remains were removed to Howard University, the community was in such a state of catharsis that they decided to have a competition and create a Call for Ideas. This was an open call all over the United States for information, ideas, images from the artistic community, architects and engineers. There was no precedent for creating a monument for a site of this magnitude and extraordinary history. They created a jury of eight members, which I was asked to chair. This would realize my dream to have a live experience with an authentic archeological site

In preparation, I went to Howard University, so that I could better understand the depth and complexity of this project. These are the labs at Howard University. While I was there, Dr. Michael Blakely showed me one of the skulls, and I took pictures with great trepidation. It was very uncomfortable. He unpacked the box and I saw the head of an ancestor who had hourglass filed teeth. I dropped the camera. The head was in perfect condition, which is one of the distinguishing features of this site. All of the individuals were buried at a site where the soil chemistry preserved the bones perfectly. Armed with this information, I came to New York with my thirteen-year-old son, because the jury process took place over several days. We were in seminar sessions for two full days before we juried the competition.

I will show you four in the first category and four in the second category that were so moving and compelling that we felt they should be honored with a citation. The first is this Wall of Persistent Acknowledgment. The artist had conceived of a huge wall that would be transparent during the day and lit at night. In the hollow, transparent wall were encased 20,000 shroud pins in brass. The graves were originally wrapped simply with a shroud of cotton. In the tradition of the day, shroud pins kept the wrappings in place. One of the few objects the archaeologists found in each grave were these short, straight pins.

The next was a paved sidewalk of broken shards. When we were in the labs at the World Trade Center, we saw thousands of shards of glass and ceramics. These artists felt that the line of the burial plot as it existed in 1721 should be marked with a broken glass and ceramic paving.

This artist indicated that one of the things he noticed walking the site is that while they were doing the digging, if you looked up at the office buildings surrounding the site, you could see office workers at the windows, looking down. He proposed that in every one of the elevators in the office buildings, brass plaques be placed over the numbers of the floors, so that no one ever forget again that people were buried under the office buildings.

This next one is a wall that was proposed that would have inscribed on it the poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar called "Sympathy," and in front of it, copper tubing would wave and make sounds. The jurors were mesmerized.

The next solution was a potted ceramic field of growing pot forms that, at its horizon line, was lined with cowrie shells.

In this design, twelve cylinders suggest core samples that are used to determine if there are archaeological finds that might warrant not digging at the site. The irony is that the government must have done these testings, and missed the burials in the initial testing. This artist decided to make huge cylinders filled with core samples, so that individuals would remember. Again, a way to create memory and sculpture.

This was a huge video screen that would have at its outer perimeter computer terminals, where the public could come and access, and manipulate projected images of data fed in from current developments and research.

This concept had three huge cylindrical structures with a suspended cross structure. Inside were large performance spaces, a library, and part of the burial site exposed. In the base of one of the cylinders was a data base with a video component that people could access.

In the next few years, the plan is to rebury all of the 440 individuals who are being studied. This will be the first time they have ever done that in the United States. One of the artists who has been chosen to create monuments to the site is Mel Edwards. He makes huge abstract portals and gateways, with Kongo-like symbols and cosmograms.

The other artist who was chosen is Barbara Chase Riboud, who was born in Philadelphia, trained at Temple and Yale, and has been living for most of her professional life in Paris and Rome. This piece, which is part of the initial series that catapulted her into the sculpture arena in the late sixties and early seventies, is called "Monument to Malcolm X."

The last artist chosen was Lorenzo Pace, who will execute an outdoor installation in Foley Square, a conceptualized boat to commemorate the site.

Thank you.

Audience: If this was a burial ground of someone other than Africans, would they have thought twice about building this building?

Hammond: This is a government issue. No. They were insistent. They had to go through the Mayor's office and have it officially stopped. They went to Congress and approximately $3 million dollars were appropriated for the dig. The government wanted the quick shovel method, but the archaeologists insisted on the toothbrush method. It took approximately eighteen hours from the first evidence of a skull to get to the bottom of each grave. Each site had to be hand drawn, photographed, measured. Each skeleton had to be removed, wrapped in special paper to reduce the oxidation from the environment.

Audience: In your story there is an ambivalent feeling about the science of archaeology. It reveals to us we wouldn't know otherwise, yet we are disturbing a sacred site. What is your feeling about it?

Hammond: I am in accord. It is a very conflicted position where you want to respect the site but know that it is sacred. I had a lengthy discussion with Dr. Blakely. I have a personal need to know. We need to know what happened as long as there is a system in place that allows for a closure with respect. This site would not have allowed itself to be discovered unless crucial information was at that need-to-know level. This country is suffering gravely from the fact that we don't know and don't know how to deal with this history. The only way we can deal with these problems is with facts, not fiction, hypothesis or hyperbole. It took me about six months to get over being in that space at Howard University, and at the World Trade site. It is overwhelming, but we need to know as a people, globally, what history has to tell us.

Audience: What do you think are some of the changes in history that this find will bring forth?

Hammond: I am sorry you couldn't see the whole video because they constructed it well in terms of presenting the initial data and then some of the findings from the bones and dispositions. The most obvious things we have to understand is that at no point were these Africans acquiescing to this thing called slavery. All of those bodies, when placed in their coffins, had their heads pointing East facing back to Africa. It will tell us about the irrational assumption we have that the "South" is responsible for what happened in the United States. It will tell us that we all were involved in some capacity. It will tell us about the dire state of human conditions for the children. The majority of the 20,000 were children, many of whom never made it past the age of five or six. It will tell us what kind of food they ate, their living conditions. The information is extraordinary. It will tell us how we have to conduct ourselves when we go to commemorate a site and how we deal with the public, that we cannot dismiss our communities. We should use a system of engaged anthropology, where we learn to listen to the voice of the community. The beauty of this project is that the people who are involved are completely open and accessible to everyone to discuss, reflect and pray for these ancestors.

Audience: Are there any burial sites of that scale in the South?

Hammond: There are a couple. This video tells that there are at least four other sites: Williamsburg, Virginia, is one. The site there is like a theme park, though. I have trouble with it. But none are as large as this one. Archaeology is a new science, developed about the time photography was invented. It is viewed with suspicion in many arenas. It is a science that is skeptical of inviting collaboration of other scientists and historians. But in terms of research in this area, the changes in the attitude about how archaeology can be used in an ethical way are being demonstrated in this project. If you are here in New York, go to the World Trade Center to see what is there. It is devastating. We need to know this, to be shaken back into a sense of our own humanity and reality. Our preoccupation with race is too often an excuse not to know what history has left us as a legacy. This is everyone's history. We all need to engage it.

Synopsis by Nancy Wynn

Leslie King Hammond’s lecture was packed with historical information about the African American experience starting in Africa and ending in a Manhattan neighborhood. Dr. Hammond’s intention was to introduce a new language and respect for African- American heritage that is being uncovered by many different professional disciplines and scholars.

Traveling to the holding prison on Goree Island, Africa was an extremely moving experience for her. She described the horrible journey the Africans had to endure as they were captured, imprisoned, shipped, sold and enslaved in the new world of the Americas. Her intent was to give historical background information that supported the fact that though the African American body, family and society had been broken and abused their spirit for their culture had not.

As new research continues to surface surrounding the African American experience there are visual symbols that point to new and more complete histories. Religion plays a very important role in African American society and the question of what constitutes a sacred space is where Dr. Hammond started her own investigation. The construction of sacred space can be in the form of a church, altar in the woods, lots of objects in a yard arranged in deliberate compositions or a burial ground with objects and symbols connoting meaning. Dr. Hammond informed the audience that the African-American culture was filled with a new language of signs that needed to be deciphered. The slaves used these signs to empower themselves against the white master culture knowing that their language of signs could not be read. Presently, as burial grounds, altars, yards and drawings are being found, information about African and African American class, status, gender and spiritual beliefs are being revealed.

In 1991, with the start of a new construction site, a huge Negro burial ground in New York City (290 Broadway) was discovered. Immediately, construction was stopped and archeologists, anthropologists and historians convened. Dr. Hammond showed a videotape "Unburied Past" detailed with facts, opinions, procedures and conclusions on how a privately owned but public space, a New York City construction site, had turned into a sacred space, a Negro burial ground holding an estimated 20,000 bodies. Court battles were waged and the conclusion stated that the new constructed building would be half the size, therefore leaving a large part of the burial ground available to be analyzed and commemorated. History and the African American society gained much from this decision but a whole new set of problems was established. If the burial ground was a sacred space, what were the next ethical steps? Closing the burial ground and leaving the bodies untouched would mean important information to be learned would be lost to history and the African American society. Who would do the analysis of the burial ground? Would the bodies be returned? And if the burial ground was to be commemorated, how would this be done considering it is a sacred but public space? Dr. Hammond laid out the answers. The burial ground was to be excavated, analyzed and the bodies returned to their original places as the research was completed. Howard University was to be the place of research under the guidance of Michael Blakey. The decision to commemorate the burial ground was desired and a competition was conducted in New York City. Dr. Hammond stated the true importance of uncovering the burial ground was: "that the Negro burial ground is estimated as the largest archeological site on the continental land mass of the United States" and "this finding will irrevocably change the nature on how we look at American history, how we do archeology, and how we perceive sacred sites."

When the bodies are returned, and the burial ground has been commemorated, it will be open to all peoples to participate, interact and relate to the information and history of the African American experience. Hopefully, the resulting public site will reveal that the African American experience is everyone’s history, not just the African American’s history. The sense of public or public history needs to be converted from a separate experience into a universal experience.

Analysis by Nancy Wynn

How and why do people retain, redefine and appropriate their personal situation, desiring to make themselves viable individuals in a culture in which they are forced to live in? Dr. Leslie King Hammond posed this question in reference to African American history and unfortunately found a dismal, if not lacking, collection of information. King Hammond's lecture was based on sharing black history, defining and debating the definition of sacred space and its connection to public space, and lastly, explaining the process of transforming a public space into a sacred space centered on the history of black slavery. The common thread through her lecture was the importance of understanding the concept and connection of space and visual signs (language).

She explained that, in Africa, space was defined as land, god and body; Africans perceived themselves (their body) in relation to the center of their universe, "where you stand is the center of your universe." As you move through the world, voluntarily or involuntarily, you affect and are effected by the changes in space in relation to your body. If one is physically displaced, one's culture/language cannot be destroyed; instead redefinement and/or intersection may take place with one's current situation. The African people were violently separated from their familiar space and thrust into an Other's space. This Other, the dominant white culture, desired to strip them of their identity believing that it would defeat their will and make it easier to enslave them. Having the need to remain viable individuals and preserve parts of their identity, the Africans created spaces filled with "stuff." This visual language, developed from African history and their "stuff," could not be deciphered and was misunderstood by the white dominant culture. Thus, Power was placed in the hands of the Africans allowing them to create interior private and exterior public sacred spaces.

King Hammond pointed to African burial sites throughout the United States and Caribbean Islands as excellent sources of study. Burial grounds are often perceived to be public sacred sites. These burial sites were filled with "stuff" (pots, beads, trees, drawings). This "stuff" in its individual capacity is insignificant and meaningless but, as a collective whole, it has enormous energy and symbolism about class, status, gender, etc., especially when forced assimilation happens and individual identity is suppressed while one is living. The African American community successfully developed a discreet way to communicate through the visual language of signs, to rebel and resist complete assimilation. Burial sites looked odd to the white culture. They did not recognize the Negro Burial ground as a sacred site because Africans were not considered to be human.

This respect for the dead was tested in New York City in 1991. The largest Negro burial ground in the United States was unearthed and a great debate erupted around the definition of public vs. sacred spaces. The burial site was found in a construction site for a public government building. A trial was held and a compromise was established. The burial site would be unearthed and researched, the government building would be half the size, the bones would be returned and, finally, the remaining land would be commemorated with a public art project. A balance was sought between science, community and history and the desired result was to create a public sacred space that was part of everyone's history, a universal history, rather than just an African American history.

What I found interesting about Dr. King Hammond's lecture was her intense motivation to understand how various peoples communicate and define themselves and their space through verbal and visual language; how the individual experience is influenced by the collective experience and how they are intertwined, consciously or unconsciously. The words space, sacred, language and public are four very loaded words. Their definitions fluctuate with time, culture and individuals. The spirit that Dr. King Hammond exhibited in trying to negotiate individual and communal difference into a collective history was intriguing and exciting. Besides actual bones being unearthed, a new language and history was laid out for all to ponder. New questions arose: how does newly unearthed history affect and change our own views on history-making? Concerning history, should more emphasis be placed on visual signifiers rather than written word? Should we always be open to new definitions of sacred and public space, can they coexist? In contemporary culture we are forced to live in relation to one another, therefore we must understand our individual differences and reasoning behind them if we are to form collective communities.