bookshelfdreams

[bookshelfdreams]

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.

[bookshelfdreams]

when horses do the thing and their heads make hearts ......

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Helping is allowed

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“Geht”

— Friedrich Schiller, Don Karlos, Akt IV, V. 3919

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“wählen.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, Akt IV, V. 10280

[bookshelfdreams]

12 photos 1 year

I was inspired by this post by @mikimeiko ad @bookshelfdreams project of taking a pic of the same spot each month for a year. To give me a schedule to follow (and remember more easily) I'll take the same pic of the same subject roughly at the same time (day/week and hour) every month! The tag is #12 photo 1 year, let's goooo

January

[bookshelfdreams]

Last year I saw @bookshelfdreams post a series of pictures of the same place taken in each month of the year and i thought it was really cool so. Here's a stream in the woods near my home in January:

picture taken 3 January, 2025

[bookshelfdreams]

17.03.2025, 13:00

New year, new tree! I'll be doing @mikimeiko's photography project again. This time, the subject is a London plane (Platanus x hispanica) from the nearby park. She is well over a century old and one of the most magnificent trees I have ever seen.

12.01.2025, 15:07

[bookshelfdreams]

So I recently saw the challenge (?) by @mikimeiko to take one photo a month of the same spot on @bookshelfdreams' blog and it sounds really fun, so here's a piece of my way to work!

January 21

[bookshelfdreams]

Spin this wheel and tell me if you got something you need/want.

[bookshelfdreams]

hey folks if you have an android phone: google shadow installed a "security app".

I had to go and delete it myself this morning.

[bookshelfdreams]

missing the merkel era is so weird because it's like. yeah she was miles better than that shit show that's happening right now but you're really sitting there like "god i miss how lethargic she was. how bland. i miss how she made me laugh that one time in 2014. and then again in 2017. i miss how she never did much of anything at all"

like. i'm not even really sure what i miss. what even was there lol!

[bookshelfdreams]

Hallo! Ich hab eine Frage, falls du dich damit auseinandersetzen möchtest: In den aktuellen Umfragen sieht es nicht so aus, als würde eine GroKo über 50% Stimmen kommen. Glaubst du, die CDU werden eher die AfD mit ins Boot holen, um ihre Mehrheit zu sichern, oder sich auf eine Koalition mit den Grünen (oder, unwahrscheinlich, den Linken, falls die es in den Bundestag schaffen) einlassen? Ich kann gerade so gar nicht einschätzen, ob die Wert darauf legen, ihre Glaubwürdigkeit in Sachen Brandmauer wiederherzustellen. Merz wohl eher nicht, aber der kann ohne die Unterstützung seiner eigenen Partei auch nicht regieren.

Hi Anon,

ich bin mir gerade nicht sicher, auf welche Umfragen du dich beziehst, denn in denen, die ich kenne, reicht es knapp für eine GroKo, nicht aber für Schwarz-Grün oder gar Schwarz-Links...? Oder hab ich dich da falsch verstanden?

Unabhängig davon: Ich hoffe ja noch immer, dass die Union im Zweifel genug Anstand hätte, eher GroKo/Schwarz-Grün/Kenia anzustreben als eine Koalition mit der AfD. Es gibt in der CDU ja schon auch wichtige Leute, die mit Merz' Kurs nicht einverstanden sind. Und in Österreich ist der erste Versuch, eine rechts-konservative Regierung zu bilden, gerade krachend gescheitert.

Allerdings bin ich mir gerade bei sehr vielem, was mal selbstverständlich war, nicht sicher. Schon gar nicht bei der Kompromissfähigkeit der Union unter Merz. Und ich finde es fatal und himmelschreiend ungerecht, dass die Welt gerade von den Launen einiger weniger dummer, machtgieriger Männer abhängt.

...sorry. Wo war ich? Das war jetzt wahrscheinlich nicht besonders hilfreich, Anon, tut mir leid, aber eins ist sicher: je stärker die 2-3 linken Parteien im Bundestag sind, desto geringer sind die Chancen auf Schwarz-Braun.

[bookshelfdreams]

One batch done! I got about 2.15m of fabric. Not that much, considering the warp was 3m but there's a lot lost on the loom and due to wools general stretchines. It shrinks a lot once you remove the tension.

The yarn behaved itself about as well as I thought it would. I had a few snapped threads but not so many it got truly annoying.

The fabric is very nice, if a bit rough and stiff. I haven't washed it yet, so that's not the final form.

And now I get to do it all over again :)

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ok so I got inspired by @bookshelfdreams to post a pic of my outdoors once a month and thought it was a wonderful idea, so here we go:

January

February

Photos are taken in walking distance from my house, on my mental health walk route. This stream was renatured in the last 8 years and now we have kingfishers and beavers and lots of different waterfowl :)