Preface

For fifteen years before his death at sixty-eight in 2013, the youth worker and environmentalist Brother Yusuf Abdul-Wasi Burgess took teenagers from Albany camping in the Adirondack Mountains. Brother Yusuf supplied paddles, life jackets, and canoes; his first-time campers brought their wariness and disbelief. City kids from hard-used neighborhoods, they took a cool view of the six-million-acre Adirondack Park. Not only was it famously, unwaveringly white, but it seemed a land of grim dysfunctionality where nothing you relied on worked. You could not text a friend or parent. Nobody moved, dressed, or laughed in any way that made you feel at home. How this big green playpen, this so-called getaway, was anybody’s notion of a good time was a mystery you did not care to solve.¹

But Brother Yusuf, Brooklyn raised, never aimed to make his campers nature lovers. Learning bird calls, naming constellations—this was never the idea. The mission, always, was to challenge and relax his teenagers’ idea of their turf. With a wider sense of place comes the glint of interest in a world beyond the close-at-hand with its hard-defended codes. Some distant college or line of work may look more thinkable after overnighting in a tent by an icy stream. Test the comfort zone this once, and next time the kids would push it harder. A stretched-out sense of where they fit here may lead to a respect for their historical connection to it, their right to call it theirs.

For this reason, Brother Yusuf always took his campers to John Brown’s Adirondack home. He told them about the radical abolitionist’s assault on a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia today), from October 16 to 18, 1859. With a hand-picked band of guerrilla fighters, Brown occupied the armory, aiming to deliver one hundred thousand muskets and rifles to nearby slaves who, he hoped, would join his effort to secure the territory between the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, then push south to free more slaves, plantation by plantation. But stuck in a small engine house, Brown’s group was no match for militiamen and marines. His holdout fell in minutes. Ten men were killed, two sons of his among them. A Virginia jury convicted him of treason. On December 2, 1859, “Old Brown” was hanged.

The teenagers Brother Yusuf took to the park knew Brown’s name, but the impact of his raid, how Harpers Ferry blazed the road to the Civil War, and the war to the legal freedom for four million Black Americans, how Brown’s trial, the first to be reported nationally, has been judged the most important criminal trial in the history of the Republic—this was news for Yusuf’s charges. Also revelatory: learning that John Brown came to the Adirondacks to join a settlement of Black pioneers. Back in the day, said Brother Yusuf, a stretch of Adirondack wilderness ten times bigger than the city of Albany belonged to thousands of Black New Yorkers. They got this land (and Brown got his) from a New York abolitionist named Gerrit Smith. From the tiny town of Peterboro in upstate Madison County, this land-rich white man hoped his forty-acre Adirondack gift lots would pull poor Black families out of cities and put them on new farms. Back then, Black New Yorkers had to prove they owned land if they ever hoped to vote. No property, no ballot—a special rule for colored men alone. That’s why Gerrit Smith came up with his idea in 1846. With their new parcels, Black New Yorkers could get out of the city, start farming, and gain the franchise. They could vote for candidates who hated slavery, vote for equal rights for all. They would be empowered. Working citizens. That’s what land could do.

So, you think twice before you tell me this place is for white folks, Brother Yusuf urged his campers out of Albany. You think hard before you say this place has nothing to do with you. This is your patrimony, your business. You don’t have to buy this story. You own it. You’re stakeholders. This land is my land. This land is yours.

In 2000, Martha Swan, founder and director of the Adirondack social action group John Brown Lives!, invited me to curate a traveling exhibit about Gerrit Smith’s radical agrarian initiative, the plan that inspired John Brown to move to Essex County in 1849. At the time, what I knew about Smith’s scheme I mostly owed to antiquarian historians who considered it a lost cause from its conception. Twentieth-century historians were less dismissive, but their interest in it was still defined by the slit-like window of Brown’s residency. (Brown was away from his North Elba home much more than he was there, and did the work that gained him lasting fame far from New York State.) Brown’s Adirondack burial in 1859, and his surviving family’s removal to points west, cued the end of any deep historical concern with the fate of the Black Woods.

Swan, a civil rights activist in the Adirondack village of Westport, urged me to approach this story differently. The exhibit she asked me to develop, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, would focus on the Black pioneers. Would I find much? I didn’t think so. There was the inarguable fact that Gerrit Smith’s original idea, a Black farm settlement for thousands, was, for the great majority of Smith’s deedholders, unrealized. Hence that word Dreaming in the exhibition’s name. Smith’s colony was, for most of its beneficiaries, no more than an eager prospect. Nor, I knew, could I glean a thing from artifacts. The cabins and outbuildings that made up Timbuctoo and other Black enclaves in Essex and Franklin Counties were down to duff and moss. I would be working without ruins, pictures, or, really, anything very tangible except headstones. Epistolary evidence from the settlers’ side was scant. No images of the grantees on their farms remained. No pictures of women or children, period. Taken singly, clues that could be gleaned from census data, newspaper posts, legal cases, military pension files, tax reports, school rolls, and local memory seemed inconclusive. Any reconstruction of this history was going to be tough.

Other challenges revealed themselves to me more gradually. I had assumed, for instance, that what I knew about Adirondack ethnic history, something I’d been writing about for decades, could only help. There were a great many nineteenth-century Adirondack enclaves that had slipped through the cracks of antiquarian and twentieth-century regional history. Wasn’t Timbuctoo one of these? I figured the exhibit would reunite the Black homesteaders with all the rest of the great unseen and unremarked-on in the Adirondack region—migratory hired hands, Irish tanners, Italian railroad workers, Polish miners, loggers from Quebec… .

It didn’t. Timbuctoo was not another bright tooth on the cogwheel of diversity. For all the poverty, social precarity, and cultural invisibility it shared with white Adirondack settlements in its time, it also stood apart. What it meant for Adirondack memory—and how Blackness, more generally, resonated in the regional narrative—was not how poor white enclaves were remembered. It was not how they were disremembered. Here was an othering of a different order: more purposeful, intractable, and, for this writer, demanding. I would need to lose ways of thinking about Adirondack landscape and history that had seemed to work for me for decades. My idea of inclusivity, long bound to the documentable (evidence of ethnic enclaves, names in the census, work crew rolls, and other hard proofs of diversity), no longer struck me as sufficient. Did the way I research, the way I see, make room for the undocumented, the great ranks of the missing?

Many of Smith’s Black deedholders visited the Adirondacks and left without a trace. Thousands more never ventured to the Adirondacks at all. Why was this? Why, until quite recently, did regional accounts of the giveaway make room for one family only, with no notice of scores of others—almost two hundred Black people—who made the Adirondacks home? Also puzzling: the antiquarian emphasis on the Black Woods as a refuge for self-emancipated slaves, even while the influence of slavery in Adirondack life remained wholly unexamined. True, here was no slaveocracy, yet Southern enslavers and their Northern enablers put sugar in Adirondack teacups, cotton on the backs of Adirondack schoolboys, and tobacco in the tins of Adirondack farmers (not to speak of turpentine, indigo, cigars, molasses, palm-leaf hats, and quilt batting on the shelves of Adirondack crossroad stores). Did this not make enslaved people silent but emphatic influencers of Adirondack daily life? In the Black Woods, a veritable army of the unacknowledged and gone missing could pack a census of its own.

I understood the racialized accounts of Gerrit Smith’s pioneers in terms of racial bias in its own time. It would be a while before I recognized how the default racism of the mid-nineteenth century was steeped in white ideas about Blackness that took hold in the region maybe centuries before Gerrit Smith’s grantees went north. Also far from obvious to me: the shaping influence of white Adirondackers’ ideas about Redness on how Black people were perceived. Indigenous peoples had sojourned in the Adirondacks for millennia before its “discovery” by Europeans, but their claim on the land would be discounted by Euro-colonizers who measured their entitlement to this new world by very different standards: in-place year-round settlement, land grants, deeds and titles. Early on, then, an exclusionary paradigm pitted the deserving against the rest.

And that paradigm not only preceded the Black farmers of Timbuctoo but persisted long after they were gone. The late nineteenth-century convergence of the conservation discourse with scientific racialism gave the region’s members-only residential resorts, hunting lodges, sportsmen’s clubs, and other elite strongholds a pseudoscientific rationale for excluding Black people and other “undesirables” for generations. In the name of guarding and defending the new-claimed Adirondack Park, poor white subsistence farmers, immigrants, indigenous people, and migratory laborers were framed as vectors of impurity, and in strokes both offhand and explicit, racialized as lesser, and unworthy of the park’s bounty.

Given the fact that a legacy of enslavement was largely absent from the region, and that very few Black people lived in the Adirondacks from the first days of European settlement, this exclusionary culture baffled me. Why was it so entrenched? Why so well defended? I was looking for an answer in demography, which, of course, was not the place to look at all—though it took a book of literary criticism to redirect my focus. In her canonical Playing in the Dark, the novelist Toni Morrison argues for a shadowy Black Other as a shaping presence in our best-known American novels, even when—maybe especially when—these books feature no Black characters and evince no concern with race. This Other makes its imprint, offers Morrison, not directly so much as inferentially, “in implication, in sign, in demarcation,” and its work is oppositional; it reinforces authorial ideas of whiteness, offers a foil to the New American—self-made, resourceful, male, white—in many of our beloved novels.²

This writer’s words shook something loose for me. Her subject was great literature, but was there an insight here as well on how to puzzle out entrenched narratives of regional identity? For all its enduringly white populace, the Adirondacks was steeped in a palimpsestic memory of slavery that stood everywhere for degradation and incapacity. Only scan the racist representations of Black Americans, free and enslaved, in nineteenth-century Adirondack newspapers, where editorials, boys’ adventure stories, and dialect columns ensured that ideas about Black indolence and easy criminality stayed evergreen in white minds—and in towns where Black people could be numbered on one hand. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, blackface minstrel shows featuring white performers were a cherished mainstay of Adirondack small-town entertainment, and every time Rastus and Jemima cakewalked into Adirondack grange halls and opera houses (even into the 1950s), racial stereotypes about “natural-born” propensities and an inherent Black servility were reinforced.³

Freedom as the vested entitlement of whiteness was a point made and remade in low culture and high. Whenever an Adirondack county history introduced the courage and resourcefulness of a founding pioneer in terms of his (always) Puritan forebears, these qualities were conflated with his undiluted Anglo “rootstock”—no small point in a place where the fight for environmental purity defines regional identity. It was a desire to ensure the purity of New York’s water that made the winning case for the conservation of the Adirondack wilderness and the creation of the Adirondack Park, and it is the park’s achievement in defense of purity whose story has dominated the region’s history for the last century and a half. Eloquent dispatches extolled the region’s vaunted unspoiled beauty and healthful assets along with the cultural and racial purity of Adirondack Yankee “founders.” From the 1840s for another century, an emphasis on social purity—who belonged, who didn’t, who were stewards, who despoilers—gave this place a name for exclusivity that outshone all competitors (including the Massachusetts Berkshires, the New Hampshire White Mountains, and New York’s earlier-settled Catskills). And always against purity stood the Other, Toni Morrison’s contrapuntal shadow that lent the normative its clarity and frame.⁴

Even the memory of John Brown was enlisted in this cause. Brown’s Adirondack sojourn would be deracialized into a one-size-fits-all fable of courage and self-sacrifice without regard to means and ends. In these tellings, his single-minded focus expressed his purity of pedigree, that oft-noted Puritan ancestry so attractive to historians who were unnerved by what he did. This enshrinement in Adirondack memory and the devaluing of Brown’s concern for systemic racial justice should not surprise us. Historians like David Blight have documented how postbellum Blue-Gray commemorative events marginalized the brutal history of slavery in the name of sectional reconciliation. What happened to Brown’s memory was happening all over.⁵

And, of course, whatever happened to John Brown’s memory affected the memory of Timbuctoo—if only because it was Brown’s interest in Timbuctoo that explains history’s attention to it, sporadic and impatient as it was. I confess that when I was working on the exhibition, my focus on the Black grantees came as a relief; it spared me the mighty challenge of tangling with John Brown’s exacting legacy. But if the exhibit gave me a pass, this book was less indulgent. As I bushwhacked into the afterlives of the Black Woods in memory (lives, not life, because Black memory made one thing of Gerrit Smith’s idea, white memory another, and white memory, more confident and empowered, wrote the lasting script), Brown was everywhere, his energy and vision backlit by the presumed inaction of Black neighbors who declined to join him. They were the foil—the uninspired, uncompelled.

Research for this book, unlike the exhibition, gave me the freedom to consider the historiography of the Black Woods as a dramatic player in its own right. How did antiquarian historians and John Brown’s early biographers use Gerrit Smith’s initiative to argue for Adirondack exceptionalism and a racialized regional brand? Recall the suspicion and anxiety among Brother Yusuf’s campers. The reputation of the Adirondacks—no place for the dark complected—is deep-set.

In the last quarter century, Timbuctoo has roused the interest of artists, scholars, and racial justice activists alike. The year 1998 saw the publication of the Boston educator Katherine Butler Jones’s “They Called It Timbucto,” an intimate account in the environmental magazine Orion of this college teacher’s discovery of her ancestors’ gift of Adirondack acreage from Gerrit Smith. In that year, too, Russell Banks’s expansive novel Cloudsplitter plunged a wide readership into John Brown’s North Elba sojourn and his Adirondack world. Timbuctoo looms as well in the Harvard historian John Stauffer’s 2001 cultural history, The Black Hearts of Men, and four years later in David Reynolds’s definitive John Brown, Abolitionist, the first biography to give the Brown family’s Adirondack years their due.⁶

More recently, Timbuctoo has inspired book chapters and papers from scholars at Rice, Cornell, SUNY Potsdam, and Harvard. The anthropologist Hadley Kruczek-Aaron has explored the sites where the Black pioneer Lyman Eppes lived or farmed. The Rochester composer Glenn McClure gave Eppes, the best remembered of the Smith grantees, a lead voice in an Adirondack folk opera and oratorio produced and performed by the seventy-person Northern Lights Choir in Saranac Lake. Schoolchildren in Adirondack hamlets have turned stories of Black farmers into folk songs and school plays. The saga of John Thomas, the Smith grantee and self-emancipated slave, is a central feature of the permanent exhibition at the North Star Underground Railroad Museum in Ausable Falls. As for the John Brown Lives! exhibit, Dreaming of Timbuctoo: in 2015, after fifteen years on the road, setting up in granges, college galleries, museums, city halls, the New York State Library, an Adirondack correctional facility, and the state fair (twice), the state Historic Preservation Office gave it a permanent home in the big barn at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site (which gave me an opportunity to occasionally refresh the script with new findings).⁷

The charismatic luster of this story in this time makes sense. In New York’s northern wilderness before the Civil War was a subversive plan to challenge race-based voter suppression, a radical bid for environmental distributive justice, and a case for the bracing value of face-to-face connection as an antidote to bigotry—even if the often neighborly rapport between Black and white Adirondackers was never color-blind. A respect for racial justice did not crown this land (Brown’s egalitarian household notwithstanding). The postracial community the giveaway’s promoters promised would arise from the homesteaders’ recognition of a common good did not prevail.

Yet ground was gained. The exigencies of frontier life ensured it. Good neighbors, honest and dependable, were too few to take for granted. Necessity compelled suspicion to defer to a practical collegiality. The way a fellow tracked a wolf, laid a fire; a helpful pair of hands at childbirth—the human touch was felt. Race prejudice was a given in the Black Woods; it was not unassailable. White Adirondackers took pride in the relative absence of a slaveholding tradition, and if Yankees stamped the region with a racialized Anglo-Saxonism, they also brought their faith in small-r republicanism, and the trace memory of Great Awakenings that urged resistance to top-down religious rule and a greater trust in the inner light of conscience. These legacies did not rout “Negrophobia,” but between them and the subversive influence the Black grantees exerted through their own examples, some biases relaxed their vigil. The picture, we might say, was vexed.

And in this sense, not because it was utopian but because it was the opposite—imperfect, rangy, and adaptive—the story here suggests a model. There have been Black Woods, after all, all over the land. Vermont, Oregon, Indiana, California, Maine—they all have secret histories pasted thick with hegemonic folklore. But lost as they are, and often misconstrued, these scattered histories still had their triumphs—gains enabled by the common, hardworking love of place. The raw world of the frontier was just loose enough at the joints to let these gains occur. If we can take from them a glimpse, however fleet, of that promised arc that bends toward justice, we see why the Black Woods matters.

So we lean in, and we look hard. A glimpse may be all we get.