GONZÁLEZ: Hey everyone, this is Ana.

NUNES: And I’m Alex. You’re listening to Mosaic.

GONZÁLEZ: So, last episode we told you about Aaron Lopez.

NUNES: Yeah, how he came here with nothing, built a successful business, became the first Jewish citizen in Massachusetts, funded the building of Touro Synagogue--

GONZÁLEZ: And also funded the slave trade.

NUNES: Right. In this episode, we unpack that last one a little bit more.

GONZÁLEZ: All words seem too weak to describe slavery. Terrible, gruesome, those are some good ones. But what we want to do is tell the human stories that came out of that inhumanity.

NUNES: And there are countless stories of enslaved people who built our country, and if you look with the right knowledge, you can see the vestiges of enslaved people in every town in America.

GONZÁLEZ: Right. Over time, the awful history of slavery leaves the humanity out. So, let’s start this episode right where we started the last one: on a wharf in Newport harbor in the 1760s.

KEITH STOKES: So here's Lopez on the wharf. We hired reenactors to do these, like, three-minute little vignettes. These are real people, and we took it from the actual ship logs, diaries, and written accounts. So the narratives are pretty close to what people would have been saying at that time.

GONZÁLEZ: Keith Stokes is showing me around the Touro Synagogue Visitor’s Center. We’re upstairs, and I’m looking at this small video of two men in tri-corner hats talking to each other.

GONZÁLEZ: Cool. Can I press the button?

KEITH STOKES: Yeah, play with it! The point is to play with it.

GONZÁLEZ: I press the button, and pick up a small telephone next to the video. Fake-Aaron Lopez starts talking about colonial merchant things into my ear. But Keith ushers me on.

KEITH STOKES: This is what is the most interesting one.

GONZÁLEZ: The next video station has two women with baskets and headscarves. They’re slaves.

KEITH STOKES: One of the issues that came to front is we're going to have to tell the story of slavery as a part of the building of the synagogue, the building of the economy and the Jewish interaction in the community. There was a lot of concern around that because the concern was my goodness we're Jews, and we were enslaved. And that's a central part of our belief system. And now we have to talk about Jews owning fellow human beings. My remark was, “We have to tell the story because it's factual.”

GONZÁLEZ: I press the button, and these women start talking to each other about bread.

KEITH STOKES: So, we decided to build into a kiosk the story of two actual African women who lived in Newport, who died in Newport, and both their husbands worked on building the synagogue as stonemasons. And in fact these two women and one of their husbands are buried in God's Little Acre.

GONZÁLEZ: These two women are Duchess Quamino and Phillis Lyndon. And they have incredible stories that I promise we’ll get to in a bit. But for now, I watch as Duchess Quamino and Phillis Lyndon talk to each other, forever on loop in a kiosk in a small museum, right next to Aaron Lopez, one of the men who made Newport into the most active slave trading port in the colonies before the Revolutionary War.

NUNES: And this speaks to the irony of Aaron Lopez’s whole life, right? He’s at once, oppressed by Christian society in Portugal and Rhode Island because he’s Jewish, but then he turns around and oppresses other people through the slave trade.

GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, that paradox is frozen in time in the Visitor’s Center. I think another story about Aaron Lopez adds to this. Remember how Holly Snyder from Brown University said in the last episode that Lopez never addresses the human tragedy of the  slave trade?

NUNES; Yeah. He only ever writes about the business side of things.

GONZÁLEZ: Right. But, Holly also told me another story about how Aaron treats his own slaves.

HOLLY SNYDER: He had household slaves. That's sort of the byproduct of slave trading is you get household servants for free.

GONZÁLEZ: It’s now the golden age of Newport. The decade before the Revolutionary War. And Aaron Lopez is insanely wealthy. He has an estate in Newport, right on the harbor next to Lopez Wharf.

NUNES: He owns slaves, and he also rents slaves. It’s a common practice of the time among wealthy families. At one point, Aaron is renting a woman named Phyllis and her husband, Peter. They have a 6-year-old son that they bring with them, also named Peter.

GONZÁLEZ: One day, the boy falls off a boat and drowns.

HOLLY SNYDER: And the parents are obviously distraught. And Lopez, I think, steps in and provides a grave with a gravestone for this child, who's died, as sort of a way of acknowledging the grief of the parents. And it's a moment of humanity and in a life that has lots of moments of ignoring the humanity of others.

GONZÁLEZ: So Holly told me about Peter Lopez, the boy that --

KEITH STOKES: Oh he's here. You want to see it?

GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I do want to see it.

KEITH STOKES: The markers in bad shape, but we'll have them come and do that next. He's the one that drowns. Peter Cranston, actually, Cranston family.

GONZÁLEZ: Keith and I are in the common burial ground in Newport, about a mile away from Touro Synagogue. We are in a section known as “God’s Little Acre”. It’s the final resting place for hundreds of enslaved and free Africans. Of the tombstones that remain intact, most are kinda busted after hundreds of years of weather. So, it takes a minute for us to find what we’re looking for.

GONZÁLEZ: That looks like Peter! Yeah it says “Peter. It says A. Lopez

KEITH STOKES: That’s it.

GONZÁLEZ: Peter son of..

KEITH STOKES: That's it, yeah.

GONZÁLEZ: I kneel down to make out what the tombstone says. It’s covered in lichen, but I can read: “Peter, son of Peter Cranston and his Wife Phillis, Drowned September 7th, 1771, to great loss of his parents and his Master, A. Lopez.”

GONZÁLEZ: He purchases this headstone for the family. But other than this one act of kindness, Aaron Lopez never acknowledges the humanity of the people he enslaves.

KEITH STOKES: I do think we get weighed down with the slave trade. And to be candid, I'm very not interested in the stories of Aaron Lopez as a slave trader. I'm more interested in the stories of Zingo Stevens and Lukaba Moraka and Bristol Yama. I can give you dozens upon dozens of names of Africans and later African-Americans who lived and worked in worshiped in colonial Newport.

GONZÁLEZ: God’s Little Acre is full of these stories.

KEITH STOKES: This entire cemetery, which is 10 acres, is the common burial ground. So the common burial ground is established in 1660 by a gift to the town of Newport. Today it has one of the largest concentrations of colonial markers in America.

GONZÁLEZ: There are over 7,000 markers surrounding me and Keith on this brilliantly sunny day. The grass is really uneven and lumpy. As we walk around, I can tell I’m stepping on some history.

KEITH STOKES: Today we have about 294 markers of Africans and African-Americans buried here. To give you a sense a density, out of the two hundred ninety five that are here. My mom who’s 96 years young, when she was a little girl in the 30s and 40s. She could barely walk through here because was so dense. So, there have been thousands of markers that have been lost. And they’re lost to age, weather, vandalism. Sometimes they topple, they sink into the earth.

GONZÁLEZ: Keith, his wife, and the city of Newport have been restoring the gravestones in God’s Little Acre for years now. A lot of the markers are slate, which splits pretty easily. He brings me to a tombstone that they’ve brought back from the brink of disappearing.

KEITH STOKES: This is Duchess Quamino.

NUNES: One of the women from the video!

GONZÁLEZ: Yeah! See? I didn’t leave you hanging! So, Duchess is married to a man named John Quamino. His story is really interesting, too, but you can google that. He dies in the American Revolution. Duchess, meanwhile, is enslaved by the Ellery Channing family.

NUNES: William Ellery, by the way, is one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

GONZÁLEZ: Sure is. And, like most of our founding fathers, he owns slaves. One of them is Duchess Quamino.

KEITH STOKES: Duchess then raises money and purchases her freedom and her rest of her children and then goes on to become what is called the pastry Queen, selling cakes and pastries, and providing what we call catering today to major events in Newport.

GONZÁLEZ: And her marker has this long inscription. It reads “In Memory of Duchess Quamino, A free black of distinguished excellence: Intelligent, Industrious, Affectionate, Honest, and of Exemplary Piety, Who deceased June 4, 1804, aged 65.” It’s written by William Ellery Channing, the grandson of William Ellery.

KEITH STOKES: Later, he would be the founder of the Unitarian faith. William Ellery Channing would say that “my belief of equality, regardless of race, came from Duchess Camino in living with her and loving her.”

GONZÁLEZ: Duchess Quamino, as an enslaved woman, raised William Ellery Channing before she bought her manumission papers.

KEITH STOKES: So here's Duchess Quamino, who also comes from Anomabo. She arrives in the worst circumstances, enslaved chattel property, but leaves this life as a wonderful mother, contributed to society, and directly influencing the leader of a major faith today. When you think of the Unitarian Church today it's one of the most universally humanistic churches. And all because of these connections. So again: why am I gonna talk about slave masters when I could talk about Duchess Quamino, and her life and her family and her influence on what still resonates today in America?

GONZÁLEZ: Keith keeps us moving. There are almost 300 markers and stories of what Keith calls, “creative survival”. We go towards the back of the acre, by this enormous tree that gives us some welcome shade.

KEITH STOKES: This is the Zingo Stevens family, here. You're talking about him. Zingo Stevens married three times, and he outlived 3 wives.

GONZÁLEZ: One of those wives is Phillis Lyndon, the other woman from the video playing in the visitor’s center.

KEITH STOKES: You've got Elizabeth, Phyllis and then Violet right here. And that’s his daughter Sarah and his son-in-law, Cuffee Rodman. And then some grandchildren here. We have no idea where Zingo Stevens is. I've got his probate records, his information, but he just disappears.

GONZÁLEZ: We don’t know where Zingo Stevens is, but we know enough about his life to piece together a really cool story. We know that, for the first part of his life in Newport, Zingo Stevens is enslaved by John Stevens, the stone carver in colonial Newport. The Stevens family actually made all of the gravestones around us. And The John Stevens shop is still right down the street, still called The John Stevens Shop, and it’s in full operation. Let’s go over there and get a better sense of what Zingo’s life would have been like.

NICK BENSON: Back in 1705, when John Stevens the first came from Oxfordshire, England, he set up shop right across the street from our building right here.

GONZÁLEZ; This is Nick Benson. He’s the owner and creative director of the John Stevens Shop, a stone carving shop that’s been in operation on Thames Street in Newport since 1705. It’s blocks away from the Common Burial Ground. It’s been in the Benson family since 1927, and it’s still a family affair.

NICK BENSON: He’s the old master.

GONZÁLEZ Hello, how are you?

NICK BENSON: Dad, this is Ana González.

JOHN BENSON: What are you doing? You’re interviewing this young man?

ANA: Yeah…

NICK BENSON: She’s an NPR person.

JOHN BENSON: You’re an NPR person.

GONZÁLEZ: Nick and I are standing in the back room of the shop as his dad tinkers with their new truck outside. Slabs of slate are propped up around us. Wooden hammers and metal chisels of all different sizes cover the wall behind Nick, who just got back from a summer carving the inscriptions on the new Eisenhower monument in Washington DC. I cut right to the chase.

GONZÁLEZ: There were people who were enslaved in the shop.

NICK BENSON: Yes.

ANA: So, what do you think about that?

NICK BENSON: It’s a difficult thing to take out of context of the times. The Stevens were very very prolific. They were hard-charging, hard workers.

GONZÁLEZ: Carving stone is a big, physical job. Especially in the 1700s. Before you can get to the beauty of the inscriptions, which are done by hand, the stone needs to be transported, hacked into a rough shape, filed down on the edges, and polished by rubbing sand on the stone with another stone. And the Stevens family makes all of the markers for people dying in colonial Newport.

NICK BENSON: And when you go up to the colonial burial ground, and you look at how many freaking stones the Stevens produced, you’re like “Wow, man. How did they make so many stones?” Because they were hauling ass, is what they were doing.

GONZÁLEZ: And they had enslaved Africans and indigenous people working in their shop, helping them haul ass. One of them is Zingo Stevens. We don’t know exactly what his job was, but he’s there, working, for years. And Nick says, that unites people.

NICK BENSON: It’s really sort of a guild mentality when it comes to this type of work. Because we’re all sort of following the same ideology and aesthetic, we’ll often band together to attack any given job. Because, really, it’s all about the craft. And I can’t help but think that that’s how, in the back of the mind, that must have been how the Stevens thought of anyone on hand, who would be able to pitch in to make things happen.

GONZÁLEZ: And no matter who’s doing the actually carving, it’s really clear that these stone markers are not only memorials to the people buried under them. They are monuments to the people who carved them.

NICK BENSON: It’s an incredibly human process. And some of what makes those old stones, and things that are carefully made by hand, so appealing is that they aim for perfection, but they do not achieve it because we’re humans. And we see that. And that resonates. And that’s what make something beautiful.

GONZÁLEZ: You can see this beautiful work all throughout God’s Little Acre, carved by the Stevens family and their enslaved workers. And one of the most breathtaking markers is of Zingo Stevens’ wife, Phillis.

KEITH STOKES: She dies, and you can see here, you'll see she died soon after giving birth to her son, Prince.

GONZÁLEZ: Zingo is distraught over the death of his wife and baby boy. And someone, possibly John Stevens or possibly Zingo himself, carves a headstone to memorialize Phillis and Prince.

KEITH STOKES: But if you look at the marker very carefully, this woman actually has an African head wrap. And if you look at the baby real carefully, it's an African baby.

GONZÁLEZ: Keith is talking about the soul effigy on the top of the stone. It’s a carving of a woman and her baby. Phillis and Prince. And it’s in the style of the colonial period, but Phillis is wearing a headwrap, and Prince has curly hair and a wide nose. There are clouds and arrows surrounding them.

KEITH STOKES: You won't find this type of imagery anywhere where Africans are enslaved in America or the Americas. One, you'll very rarely find a marker. And if you found a marker, you wouldn't see this.

GONZÁLEZ: Their inscription reads: “In memory of Phillis, a late faithful Servant of Josias Lyndon, Esq. and Wife of Zingo Stevens, who died March 9th, 1773. Aged about 27 years. Also Prince, their Son, who died March 22nd, 1773. Aged 2 months and 27 days.” Below that, the last sentiment of the carver: “Life how Short. Eternity how Long.”

GONZÁLEZ: There are hundreds of other stories in God’s Little Acre. A master chocolate grinder. The founders of African schools and churches. Music teachers. Kids, mothers, fathers. Leaders of the African and African-American communities.

NUNES: We can really see the evolution of an immigrant community in God’s Little Acre. It starts with slavery. With the stories of the little boy Peter Cranston and his Master Aaron Lopez. Then, you start seeing the word “free” on people’s headstones, and you get to see what they did for a living.

GONZÁLEZ: And by the time you get to the 1800s, there are teachers and lawyers and medical doctors, men and women, who have giant, polished granite headstones.

NUNES: Yeah, the markers in God’s Little Acre show a history of people of African descent fighting for their lives and their acceptance into this new society that they have been forced to enter.

GONZÁLEZ: And that continues to this day. It’s an active burial ground. Keith’s family is buried there. And when he dies, he’ll be right there beside them.

KEITH STOKES: It’s always interesting when we do tours there, and people will say, “That’s your name. Is that you?” And I’ll say, “Yeah that’s me. That’s our family.” So, it brings to life to people that I am so personally connected to it.

NUNES: This all makes me think though: What about Aaron Lopez, though? Here’s this guy who built an empire based, in part, in the slave trade. Does he ever evolve to think, like maybe I shouldn’t be doing this?

GONZÁLEZ: No. It’s only really in retrospect that we can see the very thin silver lining of the system of enslavement. But that’s not something Aaron is capable of doing. Especially because his life is cut short.

NUNES: How does he die?

GONZÁLEZ: Oh, I was hoping you’d ask. It’s late May, 1782. The man who made a fortune in candles and slaves, the man some call “The Merchant Prince” of Newport, is riding in a carriage in Smithfield, Rhode Island. His horse slips into a pond. Aaron Lopez goes under and never comes back up.

NUNES: Just like that, his life is over.

GONZÁLEZ: But it’s not. Not really. Just take a look around God’s Little Acre. 

NUNES: Mosaic is a production of The Public’s Radio. Edited by Sally Eisele with production help from James Baumgartner and Aaron Selbig. Additional sound from James Wyman. Our original music is by Bryn Bliska. And thanks to Newport Historical Society for access to the Aaron Lopez manuscript collection. Torey Malatia is the general manager of the Public’s Radio. I’m Alex Nunes.