In Search of the Dead: (Un)marked Graves and The Sea of We
by Thomas Glave
We had left the car parked just off the main road – or, rather, off the paved road wide enough to accommodate one car comfortably – some hundred or so yards back, amidst thick bush, as most Jamaicans would term the sprawling green growth that offered no apology for its threat to sooner or later overwhelm everything within reach. We were walking, my cousins and I, toward the enormous deconsecrated church, known as St. George’s Church during its most active years in the nineteenth century, and now referred to by people in the area, in the district of Mile Gully, in that part of Manchester parish in central Jamaica, as the “duppy” church: the “ghost” or “haunted” church.
It was indeed a huge skeleton of a ruin, its clearly once elegant (some would even say imperious) front and structure worn down by time, neglect, isolation, and Jamaica’s unforgiving sun and rains. Now, in our time, various people in the area still believed that the Lord continued to cast His almighty gaze down upon that once proud but desolate shipwreck considered to have been holy in earlier unholy times, erected by human hands on supposedly sacred ground upon which, for miles in every direction, human beings had been tortured and brutalized for centuries in order to enable the nurturing of sugar cane, from the time of Spanish ships’ arrival on this island in the fifteenth century until not so long ago. If the Good Lord did still cast His all-knowing gaze through that roof that had long ago surrendered its bones to the elements, it was always accompanied these days by glances from the indifferent moon– in fact the same moon that had finally resigned itself to having to drag the sea behind it through all its travels across the world, yet had never uttered a word, not even a whisper during the last few centuries when uncountable numbers of dark bodies had either been hurled from ships’ decks by crewmen into cold dark sea-waves– bodies still alive or in some state of dying– or when those bodies’ rightful owners became convinced (or hoped) that immediately upon feeling the chilly salty water engulfing their thrashings and filling their lungs they would awaken back in the other green place from which they had recently been snatched. . .those dark cold waters becoming a silencing sea of death and transfiguration for those who had been pitched from the decks and the ones who had chosen to hurl themselves overboard.
In fact the same moon that had finally resigned itself to having to drag the sea behind it through all its travels across the world, yet had never uttered a word, not even a whisper during the last few centuries when uncountable numbers of dark bodies had either been hurled from ships’ decks by crewmen into cold dark sea-waves
In other writing, reflecting on history and its many horrific maritime journeys, desperate leaps overboard, and indescribable attempts at transfiguration and deliverance, I have referred to the sea most critical to my earliest memory, the Caribbean, as the Sea of We: a body of amnesiac water critical to those of us descended from the Africans transported over it across centuries, into the horrors and agonies of “New World” slavery. In this regard the Caribbean, like the Atlantic, exists as a sea filled with our historical bodies: an abysm filled with who will ever know how many nameless, faceless corpses in how many forests of the dead down there: forests that I have imagined in other writing as forests of reaching arms, reaching upward, reaching toward light, or toward the primordial darkness lodged between stars, which some consider a darkness of redemption. Forests of outstretched arms and hands reaching toward a memory not filled with sweltering rat-filled ships stinking of death and disease and packed beyond imagining with the cargo that in our time must be named, spoken of, must never be forgotten. Forests of reaching arms very far down there reaching upward for memory not filled with the “undreamable dreams” and “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” suffered by both the living and the “black and angry dead” in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Forests of reaching arms as exist in surely even greater numbers in the Caribbean’s big-bellied and more ill-tempered cousin, the colder, darker Atlantic Ocean, another vast and equally unmerciful Sea of We.
It was with the Sea of We and its incalculable forests in mind that I accompanied my cousins on that distant afternoon a few years ago to the crumbling Mile Gully once-holy skeleton in whose churchyard lay buried – in a marked grave – the long-decayed body of my paternal great-great-grandfather, Stephen Sharp Glave: a white man from North Yorkshire, England, who as a younger son in a family of several younger sons determined to make his own fortune by departing England in (so my family has roughly ascertained) the year 1831, for the realm’s then-slave colony of Jamaica, to assist his ailing and aging uncle Stephen Sharp in the management of a plantation in the colony’s parish of Manchester. With the help of my noisy cousins always so easily alarmed by the possibility of duppies (fear of duppies an unfortunate phobia to possess in a country like Jamaica, filled to its treetops with them), I eventually located his cracked century-weathered gravestone in the weed-choked yard. Upon its grey sun-punished stone could still be read the words, “To the Memory of/Stephen Sharp Glave/Who Died on the/1st April 1873/Aged 58 Years.”
Several months and in some cases years later, I would tell only a few closest friends how strangely moving, and eerie, it was to encounter one’s surname, particularly in the name of an ancestor and in this instance a white English one, on a nineteenth-century gravestone embedded in the stony earth of what had previously been a slavery colony. Unsettling to contemplate the fact that this man’s DNA unquestionably resided in my body, as it had resided in my father’s and paternal grandfather’s, and in the bodies of many other (though not all) Jamaican Glaves. Moving and eerie enough to cause the breath to quicken in the afternoon’s shimmering heat, and the descendant’s tongue to fall silent. The fact was that this was a great-great-grandfather about whom I knew almost nothing except the reality of his skin color and his origins in Lythe, North Riding, Yorkshire, where he had descended from a line of people whose exact social standing in the English class system of that time remains still somewhat uncertain to us in the twenty-first century (although we know for certain that they were in no way aristocrats). Their genealogy had included from at least the year 1742 until the present day six Thomas Glaves – Thomas being the male “Christian” name most often repeated in the family. Thanks to some pertinent historical and municipal Jamaican records not having been destroyed in the infamous 1925 fire that eviscerated the British colonial administration building in Jamaica’s former capital, Spanish Town, I had learnt some time ago that Stephen had made clear in his will, dated 25th of February 1873, a mere five or so weeks before his death, that any of his several children who married what he had named in his will as a “Black” person – capital B – would be summarily disinherited, as he shortly thereafter proceeded to do with one daughter, Maria, who married one (apparently Black-with-a-capital-B) Lionel Henriques. By the years just before his death, if not before, Stephen had apparently managed to acquire a large amount of land and some wealth; he bequeathed his transgressing Black-with-a-capital-B-marrying daughter Maria five acres of land, a mule, and the right to pasture a cow on every Glave property in the colony: far less than what her siblings William, Thomas, Frances, Charles, Edward, and Eliza received, each of whom ostensibly opted for a path of lesser resistance and more ensured inheritance by deciding to marry exactly whom they chose, including Black-with-a-capital-B individuals, after their father’s death. A fifth son, Stephen Woofe Glave, died in his early twenties in the year 1865, and is buried not far from his father in the churchyard.
Moving and eerie enough to cause the breath to quicken in the afternoon’s shimmering heat, and the descendant’s tongue to fall silent.
The woman who bore and raised Stephen Sharp Glave’s children we know today in the family only as Catherine Wright: a brown or “mixed race” woman, my great-great-grandmother, who may or may not have been Stephen’s legal wife. The specific contexts of the initial encounters between Catherine and Stephen remain unknown, but it seems clear that they occurred sometime after the full and official “Emancipation” of Jamaica’s slaves in 1838. I have asked in previous writings if Catherine night at some point have lived as a slave – been born a slave – before Emancipation.ii Whatever her legal status at the time of her initial encounters with Stephen, did she inhabit a role as Stephen’s “woman,” so to speak, or one of his women? (And what might it have meant to have been his “woman” or “one of his women” as a brown or mixed-race Jamaican woman, possible former slave and possible child of slaves– or not– connected to a white Englishman in the recently “emancipated” slave colony? What would have been the erotic, economic, social, and pragmatic parameters of such a connection?) What did she look like? What did he look like? We have no portraits, no photographs, of either individual. Did they have conversations, as, beneath so many punitive suns, the lively post-slavery colony and its many living and dead moved about them? For if one imagines a nineteenth-century white male from North Yorkshire, England– in this case one Stephen Sharp Glave, a paternal great-great-grandfather who may or may not at the time, or in our present time, have repudiated one for one’s own skin color, a skin color for which his semen deposited inside Catherine’s body was partly responsible– if one imagines such a man writhing and rubbing as some people are inclined to do during sex, rubbing and grinding and even making the grunting noises some people are known to make during sex– making those noises above or below or behind or in front of Catherine, the woman whom he selected finally to receive his semen and into whom he obviously did ejaculate time and time again, given the number of their progeny, if all those resulting mid- to late-nineteenth-century Glave children were his own; if one imagines such a man and such a woman in bed together, or in a field somewhere becalmed by the overseeing moon, or wherever they found themselves when they “did it” – if one imagines all that as one attempts to imagine the woman’s engagement (or not) in the activity, and his engagement (or not) in the activity, and her and his feelings about and during the activity, and her feelings about the man in question and his feelings in regard to her, and her feelings about herself, that woman, my great-great-grandmother; and as one attempts perhaps impossibly, finally, really, to imagine her feelings about her own body – thoughts such as Is this my body, my very own body, my body that belongs to no one else but me? Is it possible for me, Catherine, to possess my own body in the year 18–? I know that my name is Catherine, she may or may not have thought: what else do I definitely, absolutely know, aside from the fact that one day I definitely will die? I will die, and so will Stephen, and so will my children. . . Did Catherine ask herself such questions at varying times, or not, as that man, the man whom she appeared to know intimately in quite specific shadings of that word, my great-great-grandfather, prepared to spend himself within her? And how did she feel about the fetus, the several fetuses that, whether for better or worse or both, soon developed in her uterus after the purposeful swimming of that man’s ejaculated semen into her body?
Is it possible that the preceding questions – questions clearly unanswerable in any “exact” or definitive way, with which one should exercise great care against the projection of one’s own early twenty-first century prejudices and judgments in engaging – yet still questions which linger and even take up great space in the mind of one of Catherine’s and Stephen’s descendants (me) as much as they linger in the pondering mind of the writer I also am – is it possible that these questions are, in addition to their being historical, literary, political, and deeply personal questions, also metaphysical ones? In considering this latter possibility I opt to utilize the prefix “meta” (μετά-) from the classical Late Greek’s meaning of “in addition to” or “beyond”: meta/in addition to the physical, the historical, the racial, the colored, the gendered, the post-slavery colony, and the later developments of “postcolonial” and anti-colonial literatures and political thought and “postcolonial” theorizing that responds, in part, to some of that literature and political thought, and more. Meta taking into account the abiding Sea of We and its ongoing relationship to these ancestors – to their very bodies and the bodies of their children but also the bodies of the ancestors’ forebears – and to my body and those of us of African descent in this century whose ancestors were forced to journey across that sea and its Atlantic cousin. . .remembering that the Sea of We also holds grave, even dire, implications for those not considered to be of African descent. (Remembering also first and foremost that the Sea of We is a graveyard of profoundly unmarked graves, utterly lacking the dignity and presence of gravestones, the very purpose of which is to mark and commemorate – delineate– a site for memory.) For a writer living and working in the early twenty-first century, a writer unceasingly obsessed with these two ancestors, both of whom died over one hundred forty years ago and both of whose genetic mathematics thread intricate equations through complex geographies mapped in the twenty-first century writer’s body – a writer in our time racially marked as black (or, in Jamaica, “brown” – and identified by some in Jamaica as a “battyman”) and trying to “figure it all out” – figure that which, partly due to the silenced voices of the dead and the invisibility of their faces, cannot entirely ever be “figured out” – and for one trying to make sense of what can never entirely be fully understood, does such imagining of sex and history and one’s own ancestors engaged in what today, with twenty-first century Western eyes, one cannot help but regard as a racialized sexual coupling, help in any way – that is to say, amplify and/or deepen in any way– one’s imagining of and reflections on the enormous amounts of white men’s semen ejaculated into black and brown and red and yellow women’s vaginas, and also no doubt at some point down those women’s throats, throughout hundreds of years of European conquest, enslavement, and colonization of African, Latin American, Asian and South Asian, Amerindian and other Caribbean peoples? Does my own imagining of my white, English, North Yorkshire-originated paternal great-great-grandfather’s loins depositing his seed securely between the legs and within the warm body of my brown (or at least, in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, definitely not white) great-great-grandmother help in any way to imagine, and perhaps make some sort of “sense” of, for literary/narrative/recounting purposes, if nothing else, the incalculable amount of British white men’s repeated ejaculations through hundreds of years over and into the bodies of black women, brown women, yellow women, and others? Does such imagining, and ultimate reality, lend any irony, and maybe mordant wit, to the wry joke I have sometimes made when visiting the United Kingdom: “And so here I am once again in England – or Britain – visiting my people.” In that joke, “my people” has meant – and keeping in mind Stephen Sharp Glave’s ejaculations and those of others, must mean – not only black British people of Caribbean, and specifically Jamaican, descent.
(Remembering also first and foremost that the Sea of We is a graveyard of profoundly unmarked graves, utterly lacking the dignity and presence of gravestones, the very purpose of which is to mark and commemorate – delineate– a site for memory.)
I did find Stephen Sharp Glave’s grave that afternoon, and reached down, with a decidedly brown hand, to touch it.
Touched it whilst wondering: can one be disinherited in the twenty-first century by one’s white English great-great-grandfather for touching his grave with a hand that is most certainly not white with a capital W, but brown with a capital B in Jamaica, and Black with a capital B in the United States and the United Kingdom, amongst other places? And if, eventually, my brown hand seeks union with a Black-with-a-capital-B man’s in marriage or a non-marital joining, will that connection lead to a disinheritance that can span centuries as well as skin colors? Can disapproving ghosts, if they be hauntingly inclined, disinherit the living, even those whose differently colored skin they never touched, never mind that the repeated thrustings of their nineteenth-century loins made that skin color a reality?
In fact I choose to believe not.
But then what of my great-great-grandmother Catherine’s grave? I never found it that afternoon. Never located it anywhere in that weed-choked deconsecrated churchyard far out in nearly the exact middle of Jamaica, so that I might pass my brown hand over it in order to touch it, feel it, as if attempting to feel and hold the flesh and warmth of that brown or at least definitely not white woman, some of whose blood yet courses within mine. I couldn’t find it, though I knew – know – it must be somewhere: the (marked? Unmarked?) resting place of a faceless, though fortunately not nameless, woman. And so it is that we cannot always find the dead whom we are seeking, especially if we don’t know their faces, as is the case for those who rest, sometimes fitfully, within the Sea of We’s dark forests of reaching hands. It remains largely unlikely that we will find them unless we are occasionally willing to live within the shadows, at the edge of shadows, that regularly inhabit undreamable dreams, our own uneasily dreaming bodies touched and – so some dreamers have insisted even after death– held by incorporeal hands. They are always there, those dead. For quite like the sea that stretches to the end of nowhere-ness and more out there, they are for all time part of We.
They are always there, those dead. For quite like the sea that stretches to the end of nowhere-ness and more out there, they are for all time part of We.
The area around the “duppy” church in Mile Gully, and the once-holy ruin itself in whose churchyard my great-great-grandparents and some other Glaves are buried, is believed to be haunted because of a catastrophic railway crash nearby in the town of Kendal in 1957: the worst train crash in Jamaica’s history and in the entire Caribbean, that claimed the lives of almost two hundred people and left scores of others in seriously harmed condition. It is averred by many in Jamaica, especially those who know the Mile Gully district, that the duppies of those many violently dead haunt the area, and the skeletal church in particular. They haunt it with grief, but also rage over the sudden, cataclysmic end to their lives: a rage equalled only by Lucifer’s when that beautiful but prideful angel was flung out of heaven by the Almighty Lord God directly toward the fires of hell. But the tale of a gorgeous angel’s damnation and the rage of so many dead, and the more complete history of a now-deconsecrated dilapidated church built on a slight hill with a weed-choked churchyard overlooking a dirt road believed to have been made and maintained by slaves two hundred and seventy-five years ago, are stories– like Stephen’s, Catherine’s, and even the vast spreading Sea of We’s– for another day. Stories that, like drowned human beings, occasionally rise up out of dark cold water in search of a mouth, bodily flesh, and a living tongue capable of speech: a tongue possessed of the gift, and sometimes curse, of unflinching memory.