Invisible Cities

Wendy S. Walters, a native of Detroit, is a poet, essayist and assistant professor of English at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her latest essay, “Lonely in America: Contemplating the Remains of Slavery,” published in the March 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine, describes her efforts to kindle more than just an intellectual attachment to her ancestral slavery. Visiting Portsmouth, N.H., after the accidental discovery of a colonial slave burial ground, long ago paved over, she ponders the contradictions of race in American life: Why, for example, we care more about the colonial houses still standing around this cemetery than the bodies that lie beneath it, despite our declarations of horror at the history of slavery.

You live in Providence, and you recently wrote about the disconnect you feel with the place. What is it like living in New England, where ugly history is so often fetishized?

Often the kind of historical preservation that defines the architecture of colonial cities scrubs away complicated histories of exclusion of and violence toward African-Americans and immigrants. For many years, these people were denied access to many of the sites of privilege that now represent the cornerstones of local intellectual, political and artistic culture.

Would you say there’s endemic “heaviness” or burden upon East Coast cities, given their identities as ports in the slave trade?

The question for me is not so much whether or not that heaviness exists, or how much history we need to mine before we can say that we’ve explored the past enough, but how we can integrate our understanding of that history into the way that we live now.