What You Should Know About Timbuctoo: Amy Godine’s “The Black Woods”
Coming soon to the Norwich Bookstore
File this under all of the history we should have learned and didn’t. This is a lost story that’s been found.
Author Amy Godine (photo, above) will be at the Norwich Bookstore on February 15 at 7:00 pm, and is bringing everything she knows about Timbuctoo, a mid-1800s place and project in the Adirondacks. Abolitionist Gerrit Smith parceled out 120,000 acres to Black New Yorkers to make them property owners (men only) and therefore eligible to vote. Godine’s presentation is part of the launch of her new book The Black Woods. Her interest in the Adirondacks is longstanding and often results in stories that counter or add to traditional narratives, or in her words, that
“confound entrenched ideas about Adirondack exceptionalism, and reach for the guy lines that lash the region to the wider, fractious world beyond. Miners’ strikes, eastern European peddlers, Klan rallies, Spanish road workers, the pseudo-science of eugenics and its impact on the early conservation movement, suffrage activism and Black pioneers -- mine is not the Adirondack Country dear to Park historians, nature writers or antiquarians. I go for something else.”
Amy lives in Hartland, VT and Saratoga Springs, NY. I interviewed her through email, and she was gracious enough to answer some questions.
Is there something that led you to this specific story that eventually became your book, The Black Woods?
In 2001 an Adirondack not-for-profit, John Brown Lives!, tapped me to curate a traveling exhibition, “Dreaming of Timbuctoo,” about a Black farm community in the Adirondacks. Timbuctoo got its start when Gerrit Smith, a New York land baron and antislavery reformer, gave away 120,000 Adirondack acres to three thousand Black New Yorkers in the late 1840s. This was a time when only Black New Yorkers who owned $250 in landed property could vote -- a restriction that effectively disenfranchised Black men for half a century.
But only a few hundred people actually moved north, and most of them moved away. So, I had my doubts about this exhibit. Was there anything to say? Smith, his biographers, John Brown’s biographers (Brown had moved near Timbuctoo to help the settlers launch their farms), and regional historians, all wrote off this colonization project as a bust. But when I left the secondary histories behind and dove into archival sources, another history emerged. Timbuctoo was one of several enclaves. There was Freeman’s Home. Blacksville. Negro Brook. Negro Hill. Descendants of Smith grantees were residing in this region in this century. New leads called for further, wider research. The story deepened up. I would need to write a book.
Am I correct that the project lasted about 20 years? What caused it to fold? And would you say it was a success or a folly?
Gerrit Smith’s mistake was to devise a high-minded plan his grantees could not afford. Migrating to a new frontier, jump-starting a farm from scratch -- this called for more than a paper deed, it begged for capitalization. Nineteenth-century historians would racialize the missing ranks of Smith’s grantees as evidence of Black ingratitude and incapacity, but the deedholders were just pragmatic. They knew this move could be – quite literally – the death of them. Those who did come, and stuck around into the 1860s, came with the means to tide them over a first year or two.
So, I have two answers to your question. Yes, for Smith, the plan struck out. But for those Black pioneers who stayed long enough to put down roots, Smith’s “scheme of justice and benevolence” paid off. In Adirondack hamlets and small towns, they went to integrated schools and churches. They were buried in integrated cemeteries. And they voted.
The Black Woods is a beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and uncommonly nuanced story, heretofore a footnote in the ongoing saga of race in America. But here is a real story, liberated from the chains of arrogant historiography and willing to look into dark corners of our national narrative and climb to summits that offer a panoramic 'us.'—Ken Burns, Filmmaker (and NH resident)
Why the name Timbuctoo? Do you know?
I don’t, though I have my theories. Timbuctoo (or the African Timbuktu) in the early Black press stood for Black economic independence, culture, and self-governance. Black reformers ran numberless accounts about it in their city papers. So I’m guessing one of Smith’s Black allies who helped him promote his land giveaway came up with this new name. But it could have been John Brown. It could have been a settler. Right now we’re just guessing.
We do know for a fact this was a place, however. Three Adirondack settlers write letters that allude to this community. John Brown ships barrels of flour and pork to the settlers of Timbuctoo when their supplies run low. His son John Jr. writes of paying Timbuctoo a visit. The Black pioneer James H. Henderson from Troy makes Timbuctoo part of his return address at the top of a long letter. But how big was this place? Where exactly was it? Can’t say. No pictures remain – not of cabins, outbuildings, barns or fences. The only tangible remnants of the Black Woods are the headstones in a handful of Adirondack graveyards.
For more information about the book and the presentation at Norwich Bookstore, click here. See Amy Godine’s website here.
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word..