reference in Cornelia’s notes about the burial ground and marking Julia’s grave
Koloman
The year is 1915. Julia Havens Johnson has been dead for almost a decade, Cornelia Horsford is in her fifties. World War One rages in Europe and across its colonies, but America has yet to enter the war. For Cornelia, a frequent traveller to the continent, this simply means more time spent at home.
She still writes of herself in the third person. In this ‘letter’, she relates how her cousins came to visit her, that they brought her things that had once been housed within their family’s home. Cornelia writes of reminiscences, tears, of visions of a past not experienced herself but passed down from generation to generation.
After this exchange, she leads her cousin Sylvester Dering to what she calls “the old slave burying ground.” She tells of how the graves, no more than mounds in the earth with headstones and footstones, were being excavated from beneath the shrubbery. A field of final resting places comes to light, the names of whose inhabitants have long since been lost time, much as their graves had been reclaimed by the forest.
But not all is as it seems. The graves may have been without names, but Cornelia was not alone in her care for them: Byron Griffing, the supervisor of the township of Shelter Island and a trustee of the Shelter Island Public Library “has the names…” It is a reference without evidence, a clue yet to be tracked down. Does it mean a record exists of who these people were who now lie buried in unmarked graves, on a low rise by Sylvester Manor?
Cornelia says she wanted to have their names inscribed on a boulder, a boulder she wanted placed next to the grave of the daughter of one of the enslaved people held at the manor: Julia Havens Johnson. She too had been buried on that ground. A sign, perhaps, that Cornelia felt some sort of connection to the history of the Manor beyond the lives of its ruling clan? That she felt a form of responsibility to keep alive the memory of these lives, much as she kept alive the memory of her ancestors by writing down her memories, her visions of them? Perhaps. Cornelia never had the boulder made, and today even the location of Julia’s grave within the burial ground has passed from memory.
But perhaps this letter provides a clue, a means to retrieve a piece of history from oblivion: Cornelia says the boulder should be placed “on the crest of the slope, at the head of Julia’s grave…”
At the head, in other words, of this grave: