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On the road leading into the center of Concord, Massachusetts, there sits a house.

It is a plain, colonial-style house, of which there are many along this road. It has sea green and buff paint, a historical plaque, and one of the most multi-layered stories I have ever encountered to showcase that history is continuous, complicated, and most importantly, fragmentary, unless you know where to look.

So, where to start? The plaque.

There's some usual information here: Benjamin Barron built the house in 1716, and years later it was a "witness house" to the start of the American Revolution. And then, something unusual: a note about an enslaved man named John Jack whose epitaph is "world famous."

Where is this epitaph? Right around the corner in the town center.

It reads:

God wills us free; man wills us slaves. I will as God wills; God’s will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK a native of Africa who died March 1773 aged about 60 years Tho’ born in a land of slavery, He was born free. Tho’ he lived in a land of liberty, He lived a slave. Till by his honest, tho’ stolen labors, He acquired the source of slavery, Which gave him his freedom; Tho’ not long before Death, the grand tyrant Gave him his final emancipation, And set him on a footing with kings. Tho’ a slave to vice, He practised those virtues Without which kings are but slaves.

We don't know precisely when the man first known only as Jack was purchased by Benjamin Barron. We do know that he, along with an enslaved woman named Violet, were listed in Barron's estate upon his death in 1754. Assuming his gravestone is accurate, at that time Jack would have been about 40 and had apparently learned the shoemaking trade from his enslaver. With his "honest, though stolen labors" he was then able to earn enough money to eventually purchase his freedom from the remaining Barron family and change his name to John, keeping Jack as a last name rather than using his enslaver's.

John Jack died, poor but free, in 1773, just two years before the Revolutionary War started. Presumably as part of setting up his own estate, he became a client of local lawyer Daniel Bliss, brother-in-law to the minister, William Emerson. Bliss and Emerson were in a massive family feud that spilled into the rest of the town, as Bliss was notoriously loyal to the crown, eventually letting British soldiers stay in his home and giving them information about Patriot activities.

Daniel Bliss also had abolitionist leanings. And after hearing John's story, he was angry.

Here was a man who had been kidnapped from his home country, dragged across the ocean, and treated as an animal for decades. Countless others were being brutalized in the same way, in the same town that claimed to love liberty and freedom. Reverend Emerson railed against the British government from the pulpit, and he himself was an enslaver.

It wouldn't do. John Jack deserved so much more. So, when he died, Bliss personally paid for a large gravestone and wrote its epitaph to blast the town's hypocrisy from the top of Burial Hill. When the British soldiers trudged through the cemetery on April 19th, 1775, they were so struck that they wrote the words down and published them in the British newspapers, and that hypocrisy passed around Europe as well. And the stone is still there today.

You know whose stone doesn't survive in the burial ground?

Benjamin Barron's.

Or any of his family that I know of. Which is absolutely astonishing, because this story is about to get even more complicated.

Benjamin Barron was a middle-class shoemaker in a suburb that wouldn't become famous until decades after his death. He lived a simple life only made possible by chattel slavery, and he will never show up in a U.S. history textbook.

But he had a wife, and a family. His widow, Betty Barron, from whom John purchased his freedom, whose name does not appear on her home's plaque or anywhere else in town, does appear either by name or in passing in every single one of those textbooks.

Terrible colonial spelling of all names in their marriage record aside, you may have heard her maiden name before:

Betty Parris was born into a slaveholding family in 1683, in a time when it was fairly common for not only Black, but also Indigenous people to be enslaved. It was also a time of war, religious extremism, and severe paranoia in a pre-scientific frontier. And so it was that at the age of nine, Betty pointed a finger at the Arawak woman enslaved in her Salem home, named Titibe, and accused her of witchcraft.

Yes, that Betty Parris.

Her accusations may have started the Salem Witch trials, but unlike her peers, she did not stay in the action for long. As a minor, she was not allowed to testify at court, and as the minister's daughter, she was too high-profile to be allowed near the courtroom circus. Betty's parents sent her to live with relatives during the proceedings, at which point her "bewitchment" was cured, though we're still unsure if she had psychosomatic problems solved by being away from stress, if she stopped because the public stopped listening, or if she stopped because she no longer had adults prompting her.

Following the witch hysteria, the Parrises moved several times as her infamous father struggled to hold down a job and deal with his family's reputation. Eventually they landed in Concord, where Betty met Benjamin and married him at the age of 26, presumably having had no more encounters with Satan in the preceding seventeen years. She lived an undocumented life and died, obscure and forgotten, in 1760, just a five years before the Stamp Act crisis plunged America into a revolution, a living bridge between the old world and the new.

I often wonder how much Betty's story followed her throughout her life. People must have talked. Did they whisper in the town square, "Do you know what she did when she was a girl?" Did John Jack hear the stories of how she had previously treated the enslaved people in her life? Did that hasten his desperation to get out? And what of Daniel Bliss; did he know this history as well, seeing the double indignity of it all? Did he stop and think about how much in the world had changed in less than a century since his neighbor was born?

We'll never know.

All that's left is a gravestone, and a house with an insufficient plaque.

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I do have a superiority complex bc I’ve never worn nor purchased something from Shein

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I shit you not, the 哈 (=“ha”) in Häagen-Dazs has a fucking umlaut on it.

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spin this wheel for a prefix, and then spin this wheel for a suffix

as a bonus you can spin this wheel to find ur role in the clan (note: spin twice if you get apprentice)

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this is quite literally on-par with a royal baby announcement

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do other countries have a groundhog day? do you all gather on February second and watch with bated breathe as a groundhog emerges from its hole? do you forecast the next six weeks of weather based on if the groundhog is frightened by its own shadow and returns to the hole?

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ummmmm excuse me Human, i am noticing we are not petting me? i am a little baby of seven (7) years old and i have never been loved in my whole entire life (tragedy.) your eye balls must not have seen when i ran in front of your legs six times in a row. i will now Scream until this mistake is fixed

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I’ve talked about Hasan’s open misogyny before but no, it’s actually still not talked about enough that arguably the internet’s biggest leftist “influencer” openly dismisses misogyny and hates women. His attitude towards women alone should have gotten him ostracized from leftist spaces—spaces where people are regularly kicked out for using the wrong terminology or not going along with ridiculous, maximalist positions—but this is what happens when men on the left say feminism is, at best, a distraction from class politics, and at worst, the whining of bitch white Karens.

And you know, obviously women and girls in Afghanistan face much more oppression than being banned from going to school, but even if the Taliban’s misogyny ended there, how dare some piece of shit, nepo baby man who sits online all day act like it’s no big deal that women are denied education just because they’re women. Again, this is only tolerated in a political environment that has rejected feminism and welcomed misogyny, and more women in leftist spaces need to wake up to how misogynistic these men are. Being a pick-me and pretending misogyny doesn’t matter will not save you and will not make leftist men like Hasan take your rights any more seriously

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cast iron? yeah thats a pretty common spell to learn

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"demigirls" is an answer in today's crossword (clue is "people who partially identify as female") and I am still reeling. who let this happen. demigirl is one of those terms I usually have to explain to other trans people what do you mean it's an answer in the crossword

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99% of liars quit before everyone absolutely believes whatever they say forever keep going king

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Sometimes the technology conspires against me to make me sound crazy in my text messages.

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it disturbs me that a significant number of people think that the issue with sexual violence, gendered violence, and misogyny is sexual desire rather than dehumanization, so they are relentlessly suspicious of others' (and their own) desires while simultaneously never at all interrogating others' (and their own) dehumanizing beliefs about other people, both within and outside of sexual contexts

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"problem plays" this "romances" that I'm proposing new and exciting Shakespearean Play Groupings for your amusement!

The Bad Dad Triad: King Lear, Henry IV Part 1, Romeo and Juliet

The "My Wife's A Floozy" Trifecta: Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, the Winter's Tale

The "Me And My Shitty Little Minion Are About To Fuck Up Your Shit Hardcore" Trilogy: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, the Tempest

The Falstaffiad: Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, The Merry Wives of Windsor

The "Holy Fuck There's Two of 'Em" Saga: Twelfth Night, the Comedy of Errors

The "Dear Diary My Homoerotic Bullshit Has A Body Count Now" Series: Richard II, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus

The "Why Are The Fucking Trees Trying To Kill Me. Hate This Shit" Trilogy: Macbeth, the Winter's Tale, As You Like It

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University field station newsletter told me giant millipedes are particularly active this time of year "when they’re on the move for important millipede reasons." I think that might be scientist secret code for "nobody really knows why." All we know is the millipedes are moving for some reason and it must be important or they wouldn't do it. Important millipede reasons.

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I think it would do a lot of people a lot of good to internalize a basic core principle of "if you tell someone to fuck off, you waive the right to be mad at them for fucking off, and personally accept responsibility for whatever comes of them fucking off"

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I love birdwatchers they’re like “I just saw my ALL TIME FAVORITE BIRD SPECIES! I’ve always dreamed of seeing one in the wild! I am ECSTATIC!” and it’s the most boring looking little brown bird you’ve ever seen.