Death on American Shores
As the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas evolved between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, slave merchants and slave owners continued to discard the remains of deceased enslaved persons, especially newly arrived enslaved Africans, into the ocean.
In Cuba, as late as the nineteenth century, greedy slave traders threw the dead bodies of recently disembarked enslaved Africans into the sea to avoid paying burial fees. Not surprisingly, the tide often carried the bodies back to the beach. As in the West Central African port of Benguela, animals ate the corpses of enslaved persons buried in shallow graves.25 The cadavers of enslaved men, women, and children were also discarded in lakes and interred in courtyards of jails, hospitals, and private residences. Similar to what happened in Portugal and Spain, in South America and North America, bondspeople were also interred in churchyards and inside church buildings. But although enslaved Africans were forced to convert to Christianity in the Spanish, French, Dutch, and the British West Indies, they continued to mourn their dead according to the rites of their homelands. Funeral ceremonies, like processions, included singing, dancing, and drinking alcoholic beverages.26A few enslaved people owned by rich slave owners in New England urban areas were also buried in churchyards with tombs bearing their names. The enslaved girl Cicely, owned by the Reverend William Brattle, for example, died in 1714 during a measles epidemic. Her tombstone (figure 5.2) is still visible today at the Old Burial Ground in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But despite this case and a few other exceptions, most graves of enslaved people in colonial North America had no tombstones, especially in the South. Even in the cemeteries for enslaved people in Virginia plantations such as Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier owned by the US founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, respectively, there were no gravestones.
Figure 5.2. Cicely’s tomb, Old Burial Ground, Cambridge, MA, United States. Photograph by Ana Lucia Araujo, 2022.
In colonial North America and the independent United States, mourning the dead was a central element of the spirituality of enslaved people, as it was for their African ancestors. Black priests or other assigned members of the enslaved communities oversaw these services. Funerals were also opportunities to congregate, sing, dance, and drink. But since reunions of this kind also offered opportunities to plan insurrections, slave owners kept a watchful eye on these gatherings. Mirroring the hierarchy among enslaved people, those who were closer to their owners, such as overseers and old enslaved women who performed their duties in the big houses, received more elaborate funeral ceremonies. During the burial service, enslaved family members and other attendants placed wooden crosses and other adornments on the graves of the deceased persons, even though these markers did not resist the passage of time.27
Archaeological excavations in various burial sites in the Americas have revealed the presence of personal items interred with enslaved persons. In graves of Montserrat, a Caribbean island and British overseas territory, archaeologists retrieved artifacts such as an eighteenth-century glass bottle of Turlington Balsam of Life that may have contained alcohol for the deceased or perhaps was employed to pour medicine in the grave, as well as metal disks used as tokens to open the path for the dead person to return to the homeland. In the cemetery of Anse Sainte-Marguerite in the littoral of Guadeloupe, a Caribbean archipelago and French overseas department, one grave contained religious objects such as a Catholic rosary.28 In Barbados, a grave of an enslaved healer, who may have been born in Africa, dating back to the seventeenth century or early eighteenth century, contained a variety of personal objects such as an iron knife, metal bracelets and finger rings, a clay pipe, and an elaborate necklace, all of which attested to the important position of the deceased among the local slave community.29
In Latin America, enslaved people could also be buried inside church buildings. British traveler Maria Graham arrived in Brazil in September 1821.
During her stay, she observed and documented in detail the living and working conditions of enslaved people. After spending three years in the country, she published a travel account documenting the various dimensions of Brazilian life in the years that led to the country’s independence. Graham was among the very few women who published travel accounts recounting the period spent in Brazil and other parts of the world during the nineteenth century. In Salvador, Bahia, Graham visited the Church of Our Lady of the Conception of the Beach (Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia), the city’s oldest church. In an entry of October 20, 1821, she explains how the dead were put to rest in the building’s ground: “The flooring is laid in squares with stone, and within each square there is a panelling of wood of about nine feet by six; under each panel is a vault, into which the dead are thrown naked, until they reach a certain number, when with a little quick-lime thrown in, the wood is fastened down, and then another square is opened, and so on in rotation.â€30 Despite not providing any details about who was buried in the church, existing records show that until the middle of the nineteenth century, slave owners, slave traders, and enslaved people (even those who were born in Africa) could be buried inside Brazilian churches as they were in Portugal and Spain. For example, by 1750 Ignácio de Sampaio was captured in West Africa, in the Bight of Benin, and sent into slavery to Bahia at a young age. He then became a member of the Catholic brotherhood Good Jesus of Necessities and Redemption, and in less than twenty-five years, he was able to purchase his freedom. He married another African-born woman, had a daughter, and became the owner of several enslaved persons, three of which he buried at the Church of Our Lady of the Conception of the Beach between 1788 and 1800.31 Like him, many others were interred in this church and other church buildings in Salvador.
Figure 5.3. Burial ground, once unmarked, of the enslaved members of the Black brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Men, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Photograph by Ana Lucia Araujo, 2009.
But the hierarchy of Brazilian colonial society was reproduced even inside the churches. Richer donors such as white slave owners and slave merchants occupied the best niches, where their names and dates of birth and death were also included. Enslaved people were obviously not awarded the same honor. Yet, this context was different in the church buildings maintained by Catholic lay Black brotherhoods. Consider the example of the brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Men in Salvador, Bahia, whose church was erected during the eighteenth century. Unlike in the rich white churches, the building’s floors feature the surviving tombstones displaying the names of free Black individuals and formerly enslaved people who were members of the Rosary brotherhood. But even in a Black church, burial spaces followed a hierarchy, with the best spaces occupied by wealthier members. During the nineteenth century, when building space was dramatically reduced, several tombstones of prominent brotherhood members were placed in the sacristy instead of the central nave. Still, as elsewhere, people who remained enslaved had fewer privileges. Although the brotherhood took charge of the burial services of enslaved members, many of them were buried outside the building in a common unmarked grave, recovered only in the twenty-first century (figure 5.3). Overall, the majority of Salvador’s enslaved men, women, and children, as well as the city’s free Black and white unprivileged population, were deprived of Catholic rites upon their death. Most of them were buried outside church buildings, especially in the large burial ground of Campo da Pólvora (Gunpowder Field).32 In Salvador, as in other cities and rural areas of the Americas, enslaved Africans, especially those who had recently disembarked from slave ships, along with their descendants, rarely had access to a respectable funeral.