Ashland Poetry Press publishes Mills's lyrical meditation on slavery in the North
05/27/2021 ASHLAND, Ohio --- Although nearly always thought of as the nickname for New York City’s financial district, Wall Street started out as just that – a wall.
And it was built largely with early 17th-century slave labor, stretching from river to river and thought by Dutch settlers to be a good way to keep out not only the natives, but the English as well. Within just decades, though, Wall Street was the site of the first slave market in what by now had become the growing city of New York.
Most of the history of both free and enslaved African Americans in New York City was lost or forgotten over time, until 1991, when contractors broke ground for a federal office building in lower Manhattan, and the required cultural research survey had to be completed.
That’s when they found the bones, hundreds and hundreds of them. In all, it turned into a more than six-acre site with roughly 15,000 skeletal remains of enslaved and free African American, as well as some Native Americans and poor whites.
“The shame of it, the disgrace really, is only one name (of a person buried there) is known,” said poet and actor David Mills, whose book, Boneyarn, was published earlier this year by the Ashland Poetry Press. “Ninety percent of New Yorkers have no idea there’s this burial ground there of people who not only built this city, but built this country.”
There have been non-fiction articles and fictional accounts about the burial ground, but this is the first time [D3] it has been the subject of poetry. Mills brings the dead to life, imagines their stories and their times. “I’m sort of writing,” he said, “to and through the bones.”
“This is one of the most important collections of poetry that APP has ever published and it is being released at a time when we are grappling with our history of slavery and racism as a nation,” said poetry press associate editor Jennifer Rathbun. “Boneyarn is a necessary, heart-wrenching read.”
It is also the first time in the APP’s 52-year history it has published a book of poetry by an African American man.
Mills, a New Yorker who actually worked on Wall Street for a few summers and considered becoming a patent lawyer, found the APP through a trade journal and was a finalist for the 2019 Snyder Prize. APP editor and director “Deborah Fleming reached out twice after that,” Mills said, and became the editor on Boneyarn. “It was very intense. Dr. Fleming is definitely a grammatician. She is very exacting and took extensive notes. It was an intense experience but I liked it.”
Mills was quick to point out those early slaves played a part not only in building Wall Street but were included in the Buttonwood Agreement, the precursor of the New York Stock Exchange. “Sixty percent of its initial stocks were related to the slave trade,” he said. And by 1830, half of the United States’ gross national product was tied to cotton, picked by slave labor.
Imagine, he said, if Google, Amazon, Facebook or Microsoft were built by people never paid a penny for their work. And how did the cemetery go all but forgotten in the mists of time? “It’s intentional. There’s a lot of guilt and a lot of devaluing,” he said. “There’s a structural desire to repress the memory in those early stages.”
But now, through words, Mills excavates the site again.
“The editors at Ashland Poetry Press are excited to release Boneyarn, poems by Cave Canem Award winner David Mills, thematically unified by his focus on the Negro Burial Ground, recently excavated and dedicated as a national historical site,” said Fleming. “Many of the poems are written in the imagined voices of people buried there while others are imagined conversations between the present-day speaker and historical slaves.
“The lyric poems and extensive notes tell us not only about a subject less examined--slavery in the North--but also reveal the resilience, tenacity, and individualism of people who faced overwhelming conditions and thrived.”
Ashland University is a mid-sized, private university conveniently located a short distance from Akron, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Ashland University (www.ashland.edu) offers each of its student constituencies The Ashland Promise, including “teaching students how to think, not what to think”. Committed to affordability, the University now offers incoming residential freshman the Tuition Relief Scholarship, as well as a variety of new forms of financial assistance for both new and continuing students. ###