It’s August, cool early morning air off the bay in Wellfleet. I’m visiting my parents. Their place named for Billingsgate Island, south of Great Island. If it still existed, I could see Billingsgate from their front door, but a storm cut the island in half. Early in the last century, houses were floated across the bay to Wellfleet. A sandbar still appears at low-tide. You can sail to it, have a picnic. Forget what it’s like to disappear.
I’d phoned Matt, the Town Assessor for Yarmouth, to ask about Thomas Greenough, a relative. He was ordered off reservation land, I say. He came to Town Hall in 1779 to fight the ejectment. He’d been 42 years old.
At Town Hall, I tell Matt that Thomas Greenough died in the almshouse. Oh, Alms House Road, he says. The almshouse burned down in 1932. On a big tract of land up against marsh and ocean. In 1831, Yarmouth voted to keep its poor in an almshouse, when people didn’t want to live on the open water. But now, Matt says, It’s prime land. The town just bought it for $790,000.
What will it be used for?
Just that, he says. It’s conservation land, to be preserved as it is. He says, If we hadn’t bought it, someone would have built a gargantuan mansion.
He draws a map to the Alms House on a yellow Post-it. I’m trying to find where Thomas is buried, I say to Matt.
You should call Roby in Cemeteries.
Matt gives me a desk, a phone. A woman at another desk shakes her head slightly. I tell Roby I’m looking for the grave of Thomas Greenough who died in 1837. She’s silent. I say, Our family cemetery is Ancient Cemetery. My mother heard that the unmarked section without stones is where people of color were buried.
And that opens everything up.
Roby says, I have something for you. But you’re not going to like it.
She has a letter in her files from 2001. From a man who’d been researching a shipwright from Hockanom. Accidently, he came across the Yarmouth Town minutes for January 4, 1826. The letter involves Thomas Greenough. And the southeast corner of Ancient Cemetery. Roby is upset. I’ll scan the letter, email it to you.
Duncan is the man who sent the letter now in the cemetery files. He’d been researching William Bray, a shipwright, in the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. In the archives, he read the order for Thomas Greenough (then 79 years old) to dig up the graves of people of color because they were too close to the graves of a white woman and a white girl, and to rebury them in the unmarked southeast corner.
Duncan includes the transcribed minutes from January 4, 1826:
“Voted that all of the people of Colour shall in the future, bury their dead in the Southeast corner of the burying yard.”
“Voted that Thomas Greenough & all other people of colour, be requested to remove their dead from the place where they are now deposited & bury them in the Southeast corner of the burying ground, as is to be laid out by the Selectmen for that purpose.”
“Voted that William Bray & Captain Joshua Eldridge be requested to call on Thomas Greenough & others, & request them to remove their dead to the Southeast corner of the burying yard, agreeable to the vote of this meeting.”
Duncan writes, “Apparently Thomas Greenough (an Indian) and others didn’t remove any or all of the buried remains, for a Town Meeting on May 15, 1826 stated:”
“Voted that Capt Prince Matthews & Capt James Matthews be a committee appointed to remove the coloured people that are buried near to the wife of Silvanus Studley and the daughter of William Bray, to some other part of the burying yard.”
Thomas Greenough’s wife, Jane, died two months before Capt Prince Matthews and Capt James Matthews were sent with shovels. Was my fifth great-grandmother’s body disinterred and reburied in an unmarked grave? Were her dead children’s bodies? Who else was given an unmarked grave? As the Town of Yarmouth began segregating their graveyard, how would they decide? Would Jane be separated from her children? Where are the bodies of their children?
These are just the people I’m related to, the people I’m looking for. How many others who I don’t know? Who is there? When did this stop? Ancient Cemetery is the oldest cemetery, the first stone from 1698.
I remember speaking to a man once in the cemetery, or listening in. Was he a groundskeeper? Was it after we noticed that my mother’s brother’s name had been misspelled on his gravestone? He said that in the older part of the cemetery, there were all kinds of mix-ups. People in the wrong graves. I had an image of bodies changing places. Movement among the dead.
I drive back over the Bass River bridge. To Packets Landing. Wampanoag land. Thomas Greenough’s land. Walk on the grass. It’s a Veterans’ Memorial and Park now. Face the boats. Try to see as he might have seen – the opposite bank, water. A sign says, “Entering Dennis INC 1793.” I need to walk to the bridge. Cars fast on the two-lane. In just a few steps, I cross the border into the next town. Blue sky and darker blue water, thin cloud smoke. This view could be the same for me and Thomas Greenough. Sea and sky. To the right, it feels like entrance, narrower. Long Pond a mile from here, inland.
Roby told me that the letter detailing the town vote in 1826 to move the bodies was provided by Audrey Rano, foreman for the Yarmouth Cemeteries. Roby said that Audrey has planted a flowering tree specifically because of this letter.
I’ve been away so long, but if anywhere is home, it’s Yarmouth. Nana had given me her sister, Marguerite’s research on Thomas Greenough – a see-through white page of typewritten names/dates tracing our family back to the beginning. I drive past the cemetery, the corner without stones, the field of grass, see the two new flowering trees. These are the trees Roby told me about. Pull in. Walk toward the southeast corner, the new trees (there will always be flowers now).
I keep thinking, What if there had been no letter?
I’d been here just a few days before with my parents to visit the graves of our relatives. Planted flowers. At the florist, I’d asked for something that will live. Flowers for Nana and Gramp, and Jeffrey, for my aunt and uncle’s newborn son nearby, for Nana’s parents buried just in front of their stones: Thomas Lewis Baker who is Thomas Greenough’s great great grandson. His wife Hazel Blanche Green.
But in the southeast corner – bare grass. The flowering trees haven’t been here since 2001. I didn’t see them a few days ago. They still have the ropes to hold each one steady. I walk into the empty space. The new trees, tied to the ground, divide the grass. In this quiet empty space, two large older trees stand at the very corner, evergreen. The rest is sun. Light from childhood.
How many years did it take for someone to notice nothing at all is spelled here? One hundred and eighty-six years since the Vote of 1826, the digging up of bodies. This corner where “all of the people of Colour shall in the future, bury their dead.” Two flowering trees to say I know you’re here. I say it too, walking into the corner, I’m here. I remember you.
It’s a two-minute drive to Alms House Road. An eighth of a mile. Almost straight across the Cape from Bass River on the North Atlantic Ocean. I hold Matt’s yellow Post-it map, but it looks like a child’s drawing, a figure with arms. Alms House Road and Gray’s Beach are on the opposite side, the Cape Cod Bay. The Alms House road itself terrifies me. One-way with trees that tower close on both sides. Enveloping. The street sign had appeared from out of the white lady flowers. But how will I get out? I drive in, get more and more claustrophobic. This wall of closely packed trees goes on and on. No turnaround, no room for a passing car, no light. What am I driving into? Where would such a large building have been? Panic. Can’t do it. Back up.
Try again. Drive forward. Breathe. Come to a fork. One way is preservation land, and the other way is Private Homes. Choose the first. Am I even allowed here? A couple more forks, but I stick to the straightaway until I come to the end. A house appears with a washer and dryer beside it. A woman runs into another small building beside a washing machine. Her hair flies behind her. There’s a place cut out in the trees to turn around, so I do.
The road curves, goes on past her house. But where does it go? I continue to turn the car around. And then I am so stunned by the million glints on the water, minnows of sun. As if light is alive. Marsh behind her house – all that blue and green. I stay a little. Another world. Too self-conscious to drive further in. Too out of place.
Head back out the narrow road. Before I’d turned down Alms House Road, I’d seen a sign that said Beach. So back on the main road, I turn left. And then the beach is right there. Gray’s Beach the sign says. So familiar. But oh, it is my beach, my beach from childhood. I swam here. I know this place, this blue. That other world I thought I couldn’t enter – it’s where I spent my childhood. I’ve always been here.
Tide high. I walk the boardwalk, look over the marsh to where I’d been peeking beside the house to see where I am now. Thomas Greenough had died over there, across the water. We have always been this close. I walk into the water in my skirt. Hike it.
On my way to a grocery store, to my right I see a sign: Greenough. A road that curves out of sight. It’s here. I know it’s his pond. I drive back, turn at the sign: BSC Greenough.
The pond is very close to Alms House Road. Where he saw the same stunning blue-green water I saw. Same marsh. Bay opening up before him. Where he died.
Like Long Pond and Gray’s Beach, Greenough’s Pond is a bright place. Even in shadow. I park my car, the pond through trees to my right. Two other cars with women arrive for an event in the distance. The women smile, think I’m one of them. It’s lucky they’re here. I don’t stick out as much among the Boy Scouts who are not outside at the moment. Maybe it’s dinner time.
Walk through the path of trees, down to the pond. Pass a two-story building with a man on the top deck. He seems a kind of guard, but lazy seeing me. No threat. The lake roped off, the whole beach. I try to step over it casually, ready to be yelled at.
This is Thomas Greenough’s pond, where he went when everything was taken away. I walk into his water. I did it once many years ago walking sideways on the hilly grass with my mother who was very nervous about the No Trespassing signs. We have to trespass here. Trespass from transpassare, to pass across. I walked into the water back then to touch what he had touched. I do it now, alone, with the sentinel behind me.
This time, the pond is larger, I see the trees behind. They wrap around the water, boughs above me on the beach. A kind of silver-blue house when the sun comes down. Pines line the road in and out, an Indian trail. Everything is entrance. My shadow on the path, and then the sideways pond, sun galactic through the trees.
Why is the light like this here? I want to speak into the quiet. Want my voice here. Sun now a small circle through the trees. Then ahead on the path, it’s huge again, a planetary spotlight. The Wampanoags believed the land, trees – the world – is not one thing, and human life another. Together, they make one thing.
Thomas’ obituary said that he wore, through the last year of his life, the title of “Lawyer.” It continued, He read much, thought more; and though always supplying himself with such wild productions as he found upon what he called and believed to be his own territory – he has gone…” A wonderful man who displayed such tact and skill as few of more pretentions or statesmanship would have blushed to own.
Whatever sent Thomas Greenough to the almshouse – illness, infirmity – he had lived here on this silver-blue pond. Where it feels as if I could call to him, and he would come. Or he has called me.
*
I want to see the Yarmouth Town minutes from January 4, 1826 for myself. Take the train to the Massachusetts State Archives in Dorchester. Find five reels of microfilm. Thread the first one and try to read pages dark and burnt and torn. A fire. They look like they’ve been in a fire. The Yarmouth Town records kept in Barnstable. The fire of September 1827 destroyed ninety folio volumes of deeds and several of court records, going back to the separation of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies. Did someone reach into the ashes? Pull these pages out?
On the handwritten pages, the meaning of the words coalesces as if it’s a new language I’m learning. The Town minutes are here, just as Duncan transcribed. The handwriting so calm and beautiful as it orders the removal of the bodies, it makes beauty vile. Though Thomas Greenough’s name swirling across the page is like a hand. I save the minutes to my flash drive, for when this seems like a dream.
I have a bus to catch to Provincetown. Only two buses a day run to Provincetown in winter. I’ll just make the last one at 2:15. South Station bus driver says, We’ll try to hold the bus for you in Hyannis. My connection. My only way back home. I make it. My two-room apartment is a renovated house from the end of the 18th century. I live on the top floor, where two bedrooms used to be at the top of stairs. A blood red stairwell leads to a door, and the apartment below. The front door downstairs originally opened to a stove – sitting room to the left, dining room and pantry to the right. I live where people slept.
*
On another trip to the Archives, I find John Greenough “lost at sea” and “died at sea” May 1832. Thomas’s son, dying before him. Was he a sailor then? A fisherman? This is why no stone for him, no burial to find. In 1820, I’d seen the flowery handwritten vital records for Prince Matthews, William Bray, Studley Silvanius, and my own Thomas Greenough. Which is how I came upon the tiny handwriting on an additional page that said “lost at sea.” My fourth great-grandfather, John, drowned.
In 1820, I also find mention of a petition of Thomas Greenough’s heirs. (Though he is still alive at that time.) Several men including Prince Matthews (who appears again in the 1826 minutes) “are chosen to meet the Committee which may be chosen in Dennis to examine the Records of Indian Lands claimed by the heirs of Thomas Greenough.” More Greenoughs wanted their land back.
*
In Provincetown, there’s a blizzard outside my glass door, kitchen windows. Snow falling steady all day all night. Afraid of black ice, spinning around and around. But after the snowstorm, after the gray slush of Provincetown’s roads, the highway is clear. Few cars. I drive to Dorchester to visit the Archives and stay with a friend, Tom. Turn toward Boston, toward Milton. Blue house. Gate stuck open, staves in the snow.
Even inside the house, Tom will put on a green hoodie, cover his head, as if there’s rain in the kitchen. But I can’t really see him through the blur of kindness. Everything – the keys to his house, the food, the music, the bed, books, movies, directions, the embrace when I arrive and when I leave, giving me room to say no and then yes if I want or no again and then yes or maybe and then yes. Here’s a windmill cookie, here’s tea, here’s an omelet, here’s the coffee in the maker waiting if I wake up before him, or here’s the coffee made, made again, here’s the soup, here’s the dumplings, scallion bread in little triangles, here’s half his sandwich. I’ve only visited him a few times – who has ever fed me this much? His seemingly limitless generosity stunning. Under this cavalcade of giving, my own stinginess feels not just useless and small, but a barrier between myself and life.
*
Jane Freeman and Thomas Greenough are both untraceable before their marriage on October 22, 1768. I began searching for them in Worcester, Massachusetts in the archives of the American Antiquarian Society. There, I also found Thomas and Jane’s son, John, in a letter from the Town of Dennis clerk who almost never wrote letters on behalf of the natives in the town. “John Greenough, the half-bred is dead.”
The name of the Dennis clerk who wrote the letter was Nickerson, also the maiden name of Deborah, the woman whom John Greenough wed. My fourth great-grandmother. The towns of Dennis and Yarmouth side by side.
For my first few months in Provincetown, I lived in the Hans Hofmann House. Learned it was originally the Freeman/Nickerson House in the early 1800s. Maybe my story is a ghost story. Jane Freeman and Thomas Greenough, both unfindable in birth or burial place, only the records of marriage and children. But here at the end of the earth, forty miles out to sea, in this borrowed house lived someone with Jane’s name, and the name of her son’s wife.
The dead outnumber the living in Provincetown, Michael Cunningham wrote in Land’s End. Through those kitchen windows, I saw the green spark for the first time. It came from the lighthouse at the end of the Cape. Before it materialized into what it was, rather than the sheen of night, I thought I saw a ghost.
Through the window, down in the street, a white movement, alive cloud which is a strange way to describe the dead. But that is how it felt, a living white smoke. Small, swirly, driven but smoothly graceful. Train of gown. I felt a chill, the age of the house. The lives lived here and on the street below. When Marconi invited the wireless three towns down the shore, he thought he might also be able to communicate with the dead. He reached Europe with his wireless. But what about the dead? Did he ever find anyone? Hear anything?
Get away from the window, I thought. But it’s all windows here. Get away from the window. What is there to be afraid of? The chill came from the “ghost” to me, like a gunshot or music, directly into my body. Walk away to the little bed built into attic eave, curtained with sheer white, like a Renaissance bed. Pull the shade on the dark window. Walking by the dining room table, I saw white condensation on the storm windows just installed. Wind blew it a little and it stirs. Oh, that, I thought. Maybe that was my ghost. Though by then, the chill was gone.
*
Howard Pyle painted the death of King Philip’s brother, Wamsutta, eldest son of Massasoit, Great Sachem of the Wampanoag tribe. He is lying on a kind of wooden stretcher on rocks and grass near the water. Others sit behind him or stand. Though one figure is unlike the other, completely covered in a cloak. The figure has its head in its arms. Bent knees nearly touching Wamsutta’s body. Two others stand on the rocks before him – one standing, one kneeling. Looking out over the water as if waiting. One man has his hands to his mouth, the other a hand to his ear. Maybe the cloaked figure is Wamsutta’s recording angel. Getting all this down beside the silver water.
