Jazz Vespers: The Lost Stories of Slaves in the Burning of Kingston
Hudson Valley locals know that Kingston contains memories of stories as old as our nation’s founding. Every year reenactors make a spectacle of the infamous Burning of Kingston, an attack on the city during the Revolutionary War.
Nestled between these moments of high action on the historic bluestone sidewalks, the forgotten history of slaves in the Hudson Valley is delivered through jazz and poetry.
On October 14, the Old Dutch Church on Wall Street is slick with falling rain. The plucking of bass strings and swinging of brushes against a snare drum pour out of the sanctuary doors. Inside, the Christopher Dean Sullivan Jazz Ensemble is playing for a small and engaged crowd in the pews.
Christopher Dean Sullivan believes that jazz is the music of American culture. A musical language that was born here.
“Jazz has always been in our history because jazz is in the moment,” he said as he placed his upright bass into its case. “Everything is jazz. You’re jazz, I’m jazz, our culture is jazz.”
Sullivan inherited his love of jazz from his mother. Long before he knew what jazz was, he was hearing and experiencing its rhythms.
“[My mother] had a record store in Los Angeles California and she would have me come there and listen to these great records,” he recalls. “I just gravitated toward it as I got older.”
Sullivan embraced the crowd gathered in the church, encouraging them to look around at the congregation surrounding them and understand they are one people. People look around, waving, smiling, realizing how many people had arrived since the music had begun.
“Folks have put us in a position to be separated based on our melanin content. That’s the trick, we’re one people, we’re Americans, we’re the people of the world,” he posited to the crowd.
He incorporates his skin into his performance, tapping the back of his hand percussively over the twinkling of a piano. Jazz continues into the night as poets approach the pulpit to speak.
The beloved Ulster County poet Laureate Kate Hymes wrote poems for this particular occasion. Her inspiration came from her work in New Paltz with the Dr. Margaret Wade Lewis Center, restoring houses and history. She learned about the immense presence of Africans in the colonial Hudson Valley and wanted to share those stories.
“In order to give voice to a story that doesn’t have any voice, that’s where the poems come from,” she said when asked why she wrote original works to share at The Burning of Kingston event.
She highlights the story of African people that can be found in records related to the burning of New York’s first capital. Her first poem is from the perspective of a slave named Harry who heard about the revolution and felt a revolution inside himself, longing to be free. He finds freedom fighting for the colonists.
Her second poem is from the perspective of Oya, who is called Jane by the family that enslaves her. She hears about her home in Africa from an elder in the household and looks up to him.
“He tells me a secret, ‘I plan to run,’” she reads. “‘The British say they will accept free men who fight these wooden masters of the world. Don’t cry, I will be back. When the alarm sounds, look for me, I will be at the head of the march, a known star pointing the way to Kingston Town.”
“We do not look back, we go forward into darkness, led by a pillar of fire. Guiding us to the promised land,” Oya’s story closes. The gathered crowd hangs on every word. The only sound in the room is the words of Hymes and the jazz that accompanies her stories.
Hymes believes in the power of these stories. She believes that this history needs a voice.
“I do know that it is true that in order to move forward, to have a future, we must understand from where we came. If you only have a piece of that then you’re going to make the same mistakes that have always been.”
