The African Burial Ground

They came as Congo, Guinea, & Angola, feet tuned to rhythms of a thumb piano. They came to work fields of barley & flax, livestock, stone & slab, brick & mortar, to make wooden barrels, some going from slave to servant & half-freeman. They built tongue & groove— wedged into their place in New Amsterdam. Decades of seasons changed the city from Dutch to York, & dream-footed hard work rattled their bones. They danced Ashanti. They lived & died. Shrouded in cloth, in cedar & pine coffins, Trinity Church owned them in six & a half acres of sloping soil. Before speculators arrived grass & weeds overtook what was most easily forgotten, & tannery shops drained there. Did descendants & newcomers shoulder rock & heave loose gravel into the landfill before building crews came, their guitars & harmonicas chasing away ghosts at lunch break? Soon, footsteps of lower Manhattan strutted overhead, back & forth between old denials & new arrivals, going from major to minor pieties, always on the go. The click of heels the tap of a drum awaking the dead.