The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  In 1686, Giles had married a Boston widow fourteen years his senior, the redoubtable Hannah Savage Gillam, a granddaughter of Anne Hutchinson. Their marriage was childless and unhappy, and they lived apart most of the time. Asked about this virtual separation, Hannah hinted at Giles’s loathing for the island and its provincial society. “As for Mr. Sylvester’s living from me he dare not live here [in Boston, where his creditors could jail him],” she wrote, “& [he] was ashamed I should go there [Shelter Island] … I have often wrote and told him of late years I would come & abide with him … but his answer was I should not live amongst such brutes.”

  It’s a good guess that Giles was simply trying to keep his wife at arm’s length. And yet his unfavorable comparison of Shelter Island to Boston also voiced the beginnings of a search that began in the 1690s for gentility, which historian Richard Bushman calls “the ideal of a cultivated and refined inward life.” Moderation, decorum, and self-restraint would become the proper attributes of a polished New England gentleman at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Godliness, and the steely dignity (and inner anxiety) and sternness that accompanied godliness, had marked the seventeenth-century Puritan man.

  Giles’s desire to acquire that new gentlemanly polish collided with his blustering sense of entitlement as the eldest son of the respected Captain Nathaniel Sylvester of Shelter Island. What he did inherit of his father’s rough-and-ready temperament made Giles an embarrassment and a burden to his family. James Lloyd, married to young Grizzell, wrote a chatty letter to Francis Brinley in Newport in 1693 asking him to buy “half a yard of the Greenish Stufe [that Grizzell] had had a gowne & pettycoat off [of].” Lloyd closed with a postscript headlined “a barbrous act.” He describes how “Brother G: S: [Giles] owed Camble [Campbell?] some money: Camble arrested him for itt [in Boston].” Lloyd paid the bail to get Giles out of jail, he says, but then “Camble went to Long Island Giles met him in Est Hampton Shook hands with him & with a trunchion felled him he now spits blood: after [which] I arrested him [Giles] which Mr Nichols countenanced, scared him out of £5 mony.” Lloyd’s own brother-in-law had ambushed someone and had beaten him in cold blood with a big stick on a public street, behaving embarrassingly outside any gentleman’s code of honor. Lloyd’s brief account of this attack, and the specter of the money troubles behind it, vibrates with the disgust of a well organized, socially adept man writing about the family black sheep.

  William Nicoll, who apparently often acted as Giles’s “keeper,” also became his executor. Born the same year as Giles, in 1657, Nicoll had served as a soldier in Europe and trained as a lawyer, marrying the wealthy widow of the Dutch magnate and landowner Kiliaen van Rensselaer of New York. A controversial but successful politician, Nicoll followed his father, Mathias, as speaker of the New York Assembly. By the 1680s he already owned the 51,000-acre freehold of Islip and had his eye on Shelter Island. He would buy 2,200 acres—about a fifth of the island, later called Sachem’s Neck—from Giles in 1695.

  Relatives’ attempts to safeguard the island acreage against Giles’s depredations had begun in 1686, when James Lloyd and Ephraim Savage, Hannah’s father and Giles’s soon-to-be father-in-law, signed a prenuptial agreement with Giles. This contract made over “all that messuage [farmstead] & house or Tenement upon Shelter Island aforesaid wherein the said Giles Sylvester doth now inhabitt” as well as half the entire estate to Hannah and to “the issue of the bodyes of the said Gyles and Hannah lawfully begotten … and then for want of such issue to … the right heirs of the said Gyles Sylvester,” presumably his blood relations. (It’s not clear what “half the estate” means, since Nathaniel’s will explicitly stated that the island was to be held in common, except for the forty acres around the house.)

  When I first read this indenture, inscribed on a two-foot-wide sheet of crisp vellum adorned with Giles’s large signature and seal, I could almost hear his cosignatories sighing with relief: the watertight-sounding clauses surely would ensure that Giles’s “right heirs” would inherit his vast property intact. Instead, Nathaniel Jr. and Giles juggled land with each other to make sales to outsiders that circumvented their father’s entail. After Giles died in 1707, Hannah retained only 400-acre Ram Island, a hilly section of Shelter Island good only for pasture, which Giles stipulated as her “widow’s third” of the estate.

  Giles left all his remaining property, about half the island, to his executor, William Nicoll. The will charged him with settling Giles’s “debts & funerall charges,” of course, but it also granted Nicoll and his heirs “the overplus after my said Debts are paid to be disposed of as the said William Nicholls [sic] shall think fitt.” With a stroke of a pen, Giles had freed himself of his father’s island.

  Obium and “the Mansion House of Capt Nathaniel Sylvester, Deceased”

  The year Giles died, another man who had known “the mansion house of Capt. Nathaniel Sylvester” since childhood was living in Boston. A slave, one of the four children of Oyou and Tammero, he was called Obium, an African name of unknown origin. He had left Shelter Island for Boston in 1688 as a young man, the property of Grizzell Sylvester Lloyd and her husband, James. Some time thereafter, Obium ran away from the Lloyds’ house, evidently on one of their horses. It was not uncommon for slaves to try to make their way back to familiar places near their former homes where they might find shelter and friends and secretly see their kin. Maybe homesickness—missing his family and community, and even the place itself, its sights, sounds, and silences—spurred Obium to think of Shelter Island, if not as a lost paradise, at least as his home. We can surmise that he was vaguely familiar with the stretch of New England he had seen on his journey north to Boston, to the Lloyds. But whatever his plan, nothing was going to protect him from the consequences of flight if he was caught.

  Even on abominable Massachusetts roads, a post rider could cover as much as twenty-five miles a day. But the rare sight of a young black man hurrying on horseback would have turned heads, and word would soon have spread that a slave had gone missing. The most reliable sources for information about fugitives are newspaper advertisements, but none was published in New England until 1704, and the first advertisement for a runaway slave did not appear until the following year. We know about Obium’s escape only from the record of a reward paid to someone of twenty shillings—one pound sterling, a large sum—“to find the horse Obium ran away with,” noted in 1691 by an elderly Francis Brinley, who had become James Lloyd’s executor and the general caretaker of the family’s accounts. Lloyd’s 1693 probate inventory confirms that Obium himself was captured and returned, but we don’t know the details of his punishment. The list of contents for the Hall Chamber includes a “negro man named Obium” along with “a pallet bedstead & rug … 1 old chest, 1 table and other lumber in the closet.” This is probably where Obium slept. A lonely life: no other human property appears among the hundreds of inventory items.

  Assessed at the high price of £25 when he was still on Shelter Island, Obium must have been too valuable for the Lloyds to sell as damaged goods even after proving himself defiant and untrustworthy. All we know of the sixteen years following his capture is that during the first eight of them, the Lloyds hired him out to three different employers in Boston, his wages rising steadily year by year, earning more—not for Obium, of course, but for the Lloyd estate—each time a contract for his services was renewed.

  Obium’s time in Boston ended abruptly in 1709, when the Lloyds’ eldest son, Henry, summoned him first to Newport, then to Lloyd Manor in Oyster Bay, Long Island, which Henry’s mother, Grizzell, had inherited as her legacy from Latimer Sampson. Henry’s father-in-law, John Nelson, with whom Obium was living in Boston before the move, wrote, “He seems to be something unwilling to part with us, but as it is in a maner the same familie I tell him that upon his future good behavior he may be assured of as good treatment he promisses his best Endeavors for your Servise &c.”

  Here is where the misery of accommodation to slavery comes i
n, and the poverty of trying to understand—today—the mechanisms of trust and distrust that made such accommodation work. Nelson wrote patronizingly, “You know how to deal with [Obium]. By praiseing or speaking well of him you may doe with him as you please.” He was to be petted and managed like a child. But as Obium hesitatingly shares his fears with Nelson regarding this unequal relationship, he negotiates, preparing to make his “best Endeavors” in exchange for the possibility of better treatment. He has learned to make use of what the sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “practical consciousness … all the things which actors know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ … in social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression.” For their part, Nelson and Lloyd would have taken their complete power over Obium as a given but still regarded themselves as kindly and enlightened men, considering the trust and latitude they were about to extend to him. The irony of it is that, some two decades after his escape, Obium, who had come to consider the Boston he had run away from as his home, now had little recourse but to accept the fate of being uprooted yet again.

  Nelson gave Obium more clothes for his new existence on Long Island than many slaves would have received in a lifetime: “A Great Coate, Double brested Jackett, & a Coate, new and all lined: 2 pr Cloth Britches; 5 Shirtes … which … may want mending, 2 pr Stockings.” Nelson explained, half jokingly, that he was sending a list “of what Obium brings with him for feare of Other disposals,” meaning that he might sell off some of his new wardrobe while traveling alone. Nelson’s smile vanishes with a final caveat: “Yett not trust him too much.”

  * * *

  In 1737, while Obium was living with the Henry Lloyds in Oyster Bay, he surely heard that the house where he grew up was being torn down. Captain Nathaniel’s grandson, Brinley Sylvester, Henry Lloyd’s first cousin, who had moved back to Shelter Island (at most a day’s sail from Lloyd Manor), was building a new house. Local traffic on Long Island’s best highway—the Sound—ran freely. Blacks, slave and free, had their own private network of informants. News came through despite the punishments and fines against gathering together or even communicating with one another. From runaways and “night walkers” daring to visit their families or friends or lovers on other farms or plantations or towns, from black deckhands in the ports, from messengers on business for their owners, and from Indian informants, news sped round the region.

  By this time, Obium knew how to read and perhaps also how to write. He owned an Anglican prayer book bound in leather and fastened with clasps. Small and worn, it was stained with dirt and sweat and tears, or raindrops, according to an antiquarian’s article in the Brooklyn Eagle in 1888, when the book was last seen. My attempts at tracking this “curious old hymnbook” and the descendants of the Joel Gardiner to whom it belonged in 1888 have been fruitless. But according to the author of the Eagle article, Obium (or somebody else) had written at the foot of the opening page of the psalms: “Obium Rooe—his book—god give him grace—1710 or 11.” (The old Roman Julian calendar year, which began on March 25, was slowly being replaced in public usage by the Gregorian calendar year, which starts on January 1, but many still hung on to the old system, simply marking the date for the first three months of the year as 1710/11, so the inscription reads as before March 25, 1711.)

  A curved dormer board and a pair of original shutters found by the architectural historian Robert Hefner in the attic supplied clues to the chaste Newport-style appearance of the early Georgian south front, c.1737. The grand double front doors would have been framed by pilasters and a neoclassical pediment.

  The book subsequently belonged to Jupiter Hammon, another Lloyd slave, a bookkeeper, a preacher, and the first published African American poet, born in October 1711, whose name was inscribed on the back flyleaf as Jupiter Lloyd. Jupiter’s mother was probably Rose, some ten years younger than Obium. (She appears in the Lloyd family papers for the first time in 1687.) Obium came to Lloyd Manor when Henry Lloyd built his house there in 1711. Given the vagaries of eighteenth-century penmanship—where the upper loop of an s is sometimes so small that the letter looks like an o—it would be easy to misread Rose as Rooe. Recent research now holds that Obium and Rose were Jupiter’s parents. Perhaps the pairing of their names commemorates the couple’s union. If so, Obium made a gift of his own prayer book to his son. It was all he owned, all he could give. The concluding page of the psalms reads “If any be afflicted, let him pray: and if any be merry, let him sing psalms.”

  * * *

  I am there with Obium at the razing of the old house and the building of the new. The manor house is still here today, but the past is being leveled to make way for the future. Obium had dwelled in that past. But his long life took him well beyond it. What I know about the seventeenth-century manor from a distance is what Obium knew close-up: the dark corners, the winding stairs, the white clouds of flowering orchards gleaming through the upstairs windows. As I imagine it, I hear him counting up the details he recalls of his deceased master’s and mistress’s comforts: what they had, what he didn’t, what he and the twenty-three others had labored to create for the Sylvesters. The softness of fabric, flowers, and feather pillows; the smell of roasting pork; the warmth of a well-built fire. Looking up at the garret that is about to come down, does he remember exactly when he learned black was different from white? Does he still feel his thin bedding in that attic and hear the straw rustle, hoping that his body and those of his little sister and brothers curled next to him will make enough heat to keep off the chill until morning? He hears the voices of black and white children playing, and of his African parents speaking a soft creole patois together, and of Joshua Sylvester reading the Bible aloud to the assembled manor “family” as George Fox had asked him to do. He hears Mary Dyer and John Taylor praying together. Outdoors, the whump of corn being pounded in a mortar, the whickering of horses to each other; indoors, the scratch of Nathaniel’s quill on paper in the quiet evening. I see Obium standing near Gardiners Creek some fifty years after he left the island, reflecting on liberty and how he tried to grab it.

  We—Obium and I, in my imagination—watch while Brinley takes a last look at the old house. We wonder how he thinks about his improvident uncle Giles, and the years, expense, and effort it has taken Brinley to reclaim what he is about to destroy. The decades-long court case that reversed Giles’s gift to Nicoll—and placed a thousand acres and the old house compound back in Brinley’s hands—has ended. It’s a big day, a great victory for him. Brinley is determined to build here, on this exact spot. He is going to reclaim his history but redefine his inheritance. He’s going to topple the mossy chimneys; erase the gaping middens, muddy paths, tumbledown fences; pull the swaybacked outbuildings to the ground. It all happens in what Steve Mrozowski calls a “single event.” The house and everything around it crashes with a scream of timbers, the roar and clash of bricks and roof tiles falling and shattering. The oak posts that held up the building are wrenched out of the ground, and what can’t be razed or uprooted is burned. Brinley is a thrifty man; he salvages whatever stuff he can from the wreck. Usable bricks and other building materials are neatly stacked. He is erasing the outworn design for living along with its plaster, glass, nails, and lumber. We stare at the ghostly cloud of dust and smoke, vanished breath and movement hanging in the air.

  Silence. Obium, one of the last surviving children, black and white, who grew up on Shelter Island in the first generation of European settlement, will outlive Brinley by five years. He was here at the beginning of slavery on the island, but he will not see its official end, seventy years after his death—and even then the business of black and white will not be finished. Next to where the new house will rise sit piles of white-oak logs and thick timbers, still green, and hauled out of the woods only a few months earlier. The tenets of slavery that shaped the old place will be hammered into the new, strengthened and ramified by the courts, by colonial legislation and town ordinances, buttressed by years and years of habit: slaves have thei
r place; Brinley has his.

  16

  ILLUSION AND REALITY

  Brinley’s Enlightenment

  In the house that Brinley built, on either side of the fireplace in the paneled parlor, capitals rise in tiers from twin Doric pilasters. The fluted shafts of these flat columns barely project from the wall. Their shallow relief looks like a sketch—the formulation of an idea. They look as if they were carved by a provincial carpenter-builder working from verbal descriptions of what Brinley envisioned rather than from a standard handbook of classical design. However crudely, their proportions embody an architectural understanding of the new Age of Reason, the sensibility of an era filtered through the sensibility of one man, Brinley Sylvester. The house is the man.

  Brinley’s pilasters shine with the glow of Newport’s Enlightenment. In 1728, a decade or so before construction started, George Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and Anglican churchman, had come to Rhode Island to await parliamentary funding for his “Bermuda college,” which never arrived. While waiting, he built Whitehall, a simple but fashionable Georgian house in the fields outside Newport, and lived there for four years before returning to London. Besides a fresh jolt of English culture and a coterie of intellectuals and artists, the genial and worldly Berkeley also brought to Newport his concept of Immaterialism. Everything in the physical world, he asserted—including Brinley’s mantelpiece—exists only in the human mind. All phenomena consist of ideas, not matter, and only God’s steady gaze maintains the physical existence we inhabit. It’s very doubtful that Brinley or many of any of his coterie of Newport friends read Berkeley’s An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. But Joseph Addison’s triumphant hymn “The Spacious Firmament on High,” published in the London periodical The Spectator in 1712, was a popular expression of that same belief in the underlying rationality of God’s creation maintained unseen by God’s all-seeing eye. Newport’s cultivated citizens inhaled this invigorating early eighteenth-century Enlightenment atmosphere. They accepted the concept of the world as a splendid, shining machine operating by divine rules of reason and science within the spangled heavens. The youthful, gracious classicism of Brinley’s pilasters and scores of similar ones in contemporary Newport bore witness to this rational although ethereal universe. As I stand in front of the parlor fireplace, the sturdy oak-framed house vibrates, and then—just for a second—levitates slightly.