My wife, Liana, and I were driving through Medford, Massachusetts, on our way back to our home just outside Boston. Looking out the passenger window, I saw a low brick wall, short, straight, and parallel to the road. I thought little of it until I saw a sign that read “The Slave Wall.” We drove by so quickly that I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d seen. After we got home, I typed “slave wall” and “Medford” into an online search engine.
* * *
My writing practice normally involves plastering the walls around me with layers of paper, each splattered with simple sketches, stick figures, and nearly indecipherable scribbles. But, the wall in my new space is made of exposed brick; pushpins are impossible, and tape fares almost as poorly. The adhesive tries and fails to sustain a connection; sheets of paper curl and slide slowly to the floor like the last leaves of the season. Unfazed by these difficulties, I downloaded a color photograph of the wall I’d seen. I applied tape to the corners and pressed it to the bricks.
* * *
In the photograph, the wall looks about three feet high and twenty feet long. Its surface is so weathered that the individual bricks are no longer detectable in some places, obscured by white sediment or mortar crumbled to dust. It looks sturdy nonetheless, able to withstand wind, rain and, as it turned out, 250 years of history.
* * *
A man named Pomp built the wall in 1765. He was one of forty-nine enslaved black people in town at the time, according to the Medford Historical Society.
* * *
Medford was once the brickmaking capital of the Northeast. The area was rich in clay, the main ingredient, and brickyards sprang up to supply the bustling market in Boston and other New England towns. The industry was more than one hundred years old by the time Pomp set to work with his string line and trowels. Some of the town’s most prominent citizens had stakes in the business, including members of the Tufts, Blanchard, Bradshaw, and Brooks families.
* * *
It was the Brooks tribe that pressed Pomp’s bricklaying skills into service. At the bidding of his captor Thomas Brooks, he built the wall to mark the edge of the family’s estate. I imagine Pomp kneeling with his tools, surveying the site while above him Brooks explains the project to a fellow capitalist. Everyone should know where one man’s property ends and another’s begins, I hear him say.
* * *
“Runagate Runagate,” Robert Hayden’s immortal poem, begins as a breathless sprint. It follows a group of runaways as they navigate by the stars and pursue freedom via the Underground Railroad. They flee “from darkness into darkness,” away from hunters, hounds, and posters calling for their flesh.
If you see my Pompey, 30 yrs of age,
new breeches, plain stockings, negro shoes;
More than five thousand black people were held captive in Massachusetts when Pomp built his wall. Did he ever dream of escaping Brooks’s clutches, to turn runagate and plunge into the dark?
* * *
In New England as in the South, captains of industry often burdened their enslaved human beings with ironic names that mocked their lowly circumstances. The cabins in the quarters were full of prophets, heroes, generals. Hence Abraham, Hercules, Pompey.
Pompey (106–48 BC), Roman general and statesman; Latin name Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus; known as Pompey the Great. He founded the First Triumvirate, but later quarreled with Julius Caesar, who defeated him at the battle of Pharsalus. He then fled to Egypt, where he was murdered.
“Scratch a name in a landscape,” the physicist and naturalist Chet Raymo has written, “and history bubbles up like a spring.” In Medford, that history would pour forth dark and fast-rising, quickly eclipsing the height of Pomp’s wall.
MEDFORD ENSLAVED CIRCA 1776
Worcester | Pompey | Rose
Pomp | Peter | London
Selby | Prince | Punch
Flora | Richard | Dinah
Caesar | Scipio | Peter
Nice | Cuffee | Isaac
Aaron | Chloe | Negro Girl
Negro Woman
Perhaps Pomp’s name was shortened to distinguish him from the other Pompey. Or maybe his captors were just having more fun with language.
pomp: ceremony and splendid display, especially at a public event.
ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French pompe, via Latin from Greek pompē
Not much else is known about Pomp. He was likely long dead by 1792, when enslaved black people in Washington, DC, were forced to assist in the construction of the original White House. In a 2012 children’s book called Brick by Brick, Charles R. Smith Jr. details their labors. Supported by Floyd Cooper’s poignant illustrations, Smith keeps the text simple. “Rented as property, slave hands labor as diggers of stone, sawyers, and bricklayers,” a typical passage reads.
* * *
Although that episode from our past had already been accessible to any eight-year-old with a library card, apparently it had been a secret kept from many adults. Michelle Obama laid it bare during her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. “That is the story of this country,” she said. “The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters—two beautiful intelligent black young women—play with the dog on the White House lawn.” Certain conservatives, including a low-watt loudmouth on cable TV, denounced her as a dishonest race-baiter. Earnest journalists eagerly pursued the story, salivating at the prospect of the First Lady being caught in a lie.
* * *
The White House Historical Association backed her assertion. Its website reports that DC commissioners had difficulty recruiting construction workers and soon “turned to African-Americans—both enslaved and free—to provide the bulk of labor that built the White House, the United States Capitol, and other early government buildings.” The whole kerfuffle should make clear that when black people say, “We built this nation,” we are not dismissing the substantial contributions of others. We simply know that if we don’t keep repeating it, blowhards and know-nothings will rush in with erasers at the ready. Our insistent demand for credit honors every black captive who dug stone, nailed planks, and stacked bricks, the Unknown Builders of decades past.
* * *
Hidden in plain sight, our ancestors’ constructions offer a historical record of black lives in America that documents often can’t. Pomp’s wall, for example, predates by nearly one hundred years the first US census that listed black people by name. These testaments to African American craft and resourcefulness gain symbolic power against a twenty-first-century backdrop of resurgent racism and obsessive attachment to Confederate memorials. The genius of these builders endures not only in walls but also in domes and obelisks and intricate ironwork—even when their names do not.
At the unveiling of a quite different wall two hundred years later, Gwendolyn Brooks commemorated the occasion with a poem. Her lines included these:
It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration,
the day-long Hour. It is the Hour
of ringing, rouse, of ferment-festival.
I sometimes think of those lines when I think of Pomp. Was he present at Thomas Brooks’s Hour of Ringing, when the lord of the manor unveiled the grand entrance of his estate to his assembled tribe? Did anyone raise a toast to the bricklayer’s dependable talent?
Vitrified Brick—In the past, a small dark “nigger brick” was used for the vitrified work in brick sewers, but recently the price in paving culls has been so attractive that they are used universally for this purpose. These brick[s] have been rejected on street work for some irregularity of form.
(W. W. Horner, “Sewer Construction in St. Louis,” Engineering & Contracting, September 13, 1911)
If Pomp of Medford built the wall, why isn’t his name on it? Why is it called “The Slave Wall” instead? How much more powerful the historical marker would be if it read something like “Pomp was here. He deserves your respect.”
In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.… They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.…
(Justice Roger B. Taney, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 1857)
The sting of Taney’s emphatic dismissal of black people’s basic human rights persisted for more than a century; its residue still lingered during my childhood, when civil rights bills were still being enacted. Not long after I entered elementary school, Aretha Franklin transformed our long-fought quest for respect into a soul-stirring anthem of personal autonomy. The lessons of Freedom Summer still resounded, and liberation was in the air. The uniform of protest had switched from suits and church dresses to dashikis, medallions, and towering Afros. Hands clasped in prayerful supplication gave way to fists thrust defiantly skyward. “We Shall Overcome” was supplanted by “Black Power!” Reflecting the spirit of the age, inner-city muralists echoed calls for dignity and self-determination, expressing demands that went unsaid, perhaps undreamed of, in Pomp’s day. Wielding brushes and buckets of paint, artists mounted ladders and scaffolds to splash color onto bricks until the stubborn masonry yielded. Poets, warriors, and philosophers bloomed into view. Hence Phillis, Malcolm, Douglass.
* * *
The mural movement took shape in 1967, with the dedication of the Wall of Respect on the South Side of Chicago, where Gwendolyn Brooks helped ring in the changes with “The Wall,” her poem written for the occasion. In his poem of the same title, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) also saluted the twenty-foot-by-sixty-foot “mighty black wall”:
A black creation
Black art, of the people,
For the people,
Art for people’s sake
Black people …
Murals began to spring up in other cities, including Detroit and St. Louis. In 1968, a group of seven painters including my father and eldest brother met in front of a wall at the intersection of Leffingwell and Franklin Avenues. Working with the support and protection of the Zulus, Black Liberators, and other activist groups, they adorned the bricks with portraits of H. Rap Brown, Phillis Wheatley, W. E. B. DuBois, and other notable figures. They added a sign emblazoned with Marcus Garvey’s famous exhortation, “Up, you mighty race.” The wall became a gathering spot. Rallies convened regularly, complete with speeches, poems, and musical performances. Residents of the all–African American North Side were invited to black culture meetings every fourth Sunday of each month.
* * *
I have only a dim memory of events at the wall. The details are limited and perhaps not entirely accurate. A framed photograph of the mural, prominently displayed in my mother’s living room, helps to fill in the blanks. It’s a reproduction of an image originally published in the October 13, 1968, edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, under the headline “Black Pride.” When I study it certain memories return, or at least I think they do: the sight of my father and brother on ladders, the sound of crowds and music, the feel of my mother’s hand holding mine. In my mind, the faces on the bricks seem as vivid as the day they were painted.
* * *
I look at the mural, at Wheatley, born in West Africa in 1753, and then to DuBois, who died there 210 years later. Between them, I see a shimmering filament of resourcefulness and determination, the invisible cable that connects our past to our present. I note that time has not been kind to every person depicted on the wall; some have lost their relevance or luster in the years since the newspaper published the photograph. Even so, that fact in no way removes them from the company of Makers and Doers and Artists who continue to shape the story of our experience here. Together they compose a narrative of epic resilience from clumps of earth, bits of wood, and permutations of brick.
* * *
Chastened by yet another brutal New England winter, we’ve postponed returning to Medford until we’re certain of spring’s arrival. Our pilgrimage there will be the most recent in a series of similar excursions. Of late, we have spent a long, hot afternoon in a Newport, Rhode Island, cemetery, looking for tombstones carved by the enslaved artisan Zingo Stevens. We have staggered through aggressive winds and eight-degree weather to pay respect to the fallen captives interred in the African Burying Ground in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I suspect these trips do for me what churches or mosques do for many others, because they summon in me a close approximation of religious feeling. When I think of “religion,” I think not of gods but of ancestors. My thoughts, I believe, have nothing to do with blasphemy and everything to do with sanctity, gratitude, and grace. Of principles embodied, foundations laid, and sacrifices endured. Dred. Fannie. Rosa. For me, they and others are the holiest of ghosts. The sight of Emmett Till’s casket or a meeting hall, where Frederick Douglass shook the walls with his eloquence, moves my spirit more than talk of mangers, burning bushes, and parting seas ever could. In my embrace of these lives, these relics, I am saved by history, if only for a while. I have been blessed to discover that salvation may turn up in the unlikeliest of places, even by the side of a road in New England, where a man named Pomp built a wall.