by Angela Starita
Captains back from Barbados, manor houses, sugar plantations, slavery. This is the economic backdrop of a Jane Austen novel. But New Jersey, central New Jersey, was, it turns out, a locus of this trade too. Or more accurate to say, it was a locus of the fruits of the sugar trade. A website I found written by an amateur historian talks about the huge size of a fortune by a family called Morris all made in the sugar trade. He goes on to talk about enslaved people coming from Barbados who had learned farming there and then in NJ learned iron smithing. In 1804, New Jersey law stated that the children of slaves born after July 4, 1804 would be freed on their 21st birthdays if female, 25th if male. This of course kept slavery largely in place and in fact, NJ was the last northern state to abolish slavery, the result of an amendment to the state constitution in January 1866.
The Morris estate is a short walk east from the site of the North American Phalanx (NAP), a planned community built on the ideas of a French philosopher, Charles Fourier, mentioned in earlier columns. Constructed on a 673-acre site Colts Neck, NJ in 1843, the NAP sought to provide residents with work both meaningful and pleasurable. The land had previously belonged to someone named Joseph Van Mater. One source claims that he was single and aspired to own 100 slaves, but deaths (presumably the slaves’) kept him from reaching his goal. It goes on to say that “in his will he [Van Mater] freed all his slaves and, stories handed down, tell us they wandered up and down Phalanx road for days, lost and forlorn.” The NAP wouldn’t let them stay on the land they’d worked their whole lives. Commentary on the NAP rarely mentions the site’s past or the irony that a community designed to free us of drudgery had, just a few years before its founding, been worked by slaves.
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I know nothing about the history of slavery in neighboring Howell, the town where I grew up. In my years there, the mid-1970s-’80s–there were two distinct Black neighborhoods. One was about a quarter of a mile from my house; the other along Route 9 near a poor white neighborhood of converted summer bungalows called Freewood Acres, a portmanteau of the two adjacent towns, Freehold and Lakewood. To call these areas neighborhoods might imply a grid of streets with houses, but both were more like family compounds–one piece of land with woods on either side where maybe ten small shacks arranged in no particular order that I could discern without internal streets or walkways separating them. I’d heard classmates refer to one of the two as the Black Village; in my hearing at least, it wasn’t a pejorative but a geographic point of reference. I only knew two Black girls from the neighborhood near me, and we never talked about how our families came to live in Howell.
Such shacks were not at all unusual in Howell, and they were lived in by whites too. Across the street from our house—a colonial-style 3-bedroom house that my parents had built on a 10-acre plot—a young couple lived in a 3-room house, maybe 500 square feet in area. I’d babysit their child on occasion and remember only the feeling of enclosure, the intense awareness of walls. A hundred yards away, an investment banker built a large chalet with swimming pool, horse barns, and a riding ring. Every Sunday, he hosted competitions, and the street would be filled with horse trailers from all over the state. It went on for years until he was arrested for fraud. All that to say, that as raggedy as Howell was, as impassive and untethered to any world I wanted to be a part of, it had extraordinary blindness to class. These worlds co-existed and no one seemed to care about the juxtaposition.
But what makes the two Black neighborhoods different is that they were clearly just that: defined by the race of the people who lived there, separate from the rest of the town, and made up of small houses in a single compound. In my memory at least, friendships in my junior high school weren’t defined by race. (I think back to a daily ritual after lunch when the vice-principal would hand over his mike to Lynne Williams and Rose Mennino, physical opposites well beyond race, so they could sing a love duet.) Since I was a newcomer to the place and focused on my own survival, I doubt my understanding of the school’s racial dynamics are in any way dependable, and the spatial evidence speaks to a more fraught history.
The arrangement of the buildings in the Black neighborhoods suggests they were first inhabited by an extended family and then later, to use Fourier’s terms, by those with complementary passions—in this particular case, perhaps, a passion for keeping safe. Whatever the attraction, the site eschewed pathways and streets and not all of the houses faced the road. My mother dreamt of a similar arrangement, wishing that each of her two sisters had a house next door, much like the Sansones, an extended family in my town that had built houses on one piece of land, defining their compound with a low chain-link fence. Black Village had no such well-delineated borders; the houses sat in a clearing in the woods with the road as the only hard-edged boundary.
Perhaps to each set of people the presence or absence of a fence was more or less “natural” in their conception of home. But it seems that in both cases the goal was to create a protective barrier. For my mother, the bounding of space was a matter of history and personality: observe but hold back, stay separate, trust no group beyond family (and even that with a cool head). I can’t make claims for the reasons Black families of Howell may have built these compounds beyond the probable need for physical protection, though the circumstances of their arrival in New Jersey, would certainly be part of the story. Like many of the poor white families in the town, had they come to Howell (once Farmingdale) from farther south in the state as itinerant farmers and stayed? Were they refugees from nearby cities? Had their ancestors been enslaved on nearby farms? It was a possibility I’d never considered before learning about the Van Mater farm.
Even without knowing the origins of the neighborhoods, though, it’s clear that residents hadn’t come to Howell with any vision of traditional suburbia. The “organic” qualities of the site—its seemingly random arrangement of houses—had little in common with the much maligned cul de sacs of aspirational housing estates, except, that is, for the aspirational quality itself, the drive to have a physical site to shape as you want. (Famously, William Levitt conceived of the houses of his Long Island development, Levittown, as foundational structures that homeowners could and should customize as their needs changed. Aerial photographs of the town through the decades illustrate how residents really did alter the original Levitt footprint, defying the tired trope of suburban conformity.)
The ability to shape your physical space is of course beholden to any number of factors, wealth topping the list. But it’s also a matter of a town’s culture, its willingness to sacrifice prestige, and home values, in exchange for a commitment to idiosyncrasy. Howell was the kind of place where no one complained or commented if you kept rusted cars in the front yard. That itself was a real kind of freedom, my father’s favorite aspect of the place, not having to answer to any sense of community-determined decorum. I’m sure no one on Howell’s community board (motto: How Well We Serve) explicitly said, “Let’s make space for weirdos,” but there was a certain pride in the place’s anything-goes attitude and aesthetic (a fact that made it the butt of jokes in the more middle-class towns nearby). This impassive response to difference may have been shaped by the town’s history of housing refugees from Communist countries: Latvians, Cossacks, Lithuanians, and Mongolians, most of whom had arrived in the 1950s. Their churches and temples were just a regular part of our landscape. The Dalai Lama came to town in 1979 to visit the Kalmuk Buddhists who lived in Freewood Acres, and even that barely warranted particular pride or concern. It happened and that was just fine.
My experience of Howell was usually one of melancholy and disconnection, but I think for a lot of the residents it was exactly disconnection that they were looking for, a place that seemed to let you live with fewer of the everyday strictures of an ordered life. Did Howell’s rejection of a standard-sized suburbia make for a safer environment for its Black residents in an overwhelmingly white town, one they chose for that reason? Or had their families landed in such an oddball universe by chance or economic necessity? Of course, the men and women who’d been freed in the 1840s by a slave owner and then rejected by the utopians of the NAP needed a haven from capitalism far more than the white farmers and social critics who built the phalanx believing they would remake society. At the risk of overstating the case, I’d say people moved to Howell for the exact opposite reason: no one had any hope for large-scale change, so they retreated to a place where disconnection was tacitly honored –you stay on your property and I’ll stay on mine. The decision to retreat isn’t one I admire philosophically or personally: as a teenager, I paid a fairly high social price so that my middle-aged parents could opt for isolation. But ironically, the mentality of resignation and removal made for a town, though far from utopia, had managed to fashion at least a small opening for greater racial and ethnic diversity.