200 Years Later, A Reckoning With Slavery In New Haven

Top: Historian and author Jill Marie Snyder and Valarie Stanley, senior warden at St. Luke's Episcopal Church. Bottom: Members of the Salt & Pepper Gospel Singers. Lucy Gellman Photos.  

The Rev. Cecil Tengatenga raised his hands, welcoming two of New Haven's forgotten spirits into Trinity Episcopal Church. "Come, Mother Lucy, your nameless name, ancestor." Drums rose and rolled through the sanctuary, sound weaving in between the pews and up through the choir loft. "Come, Sister Lois, your nameless name, ancestor." An Udu drum, palmed at exactly the right moment, made a sound like falling water. "Come, give us your protection."

Those sacred words came to Trinity on the Green Sunday night, in a service of lamentation and healing for Lucy and Lois Tritton, a mother and daughter who were enslaved in Nova Scotia and New Haven, and sold as property on the New Haven Green on March 8, 1825. At the time, it marked the last known sale of enslaved Black people in New Haven and in Connecticut, although slavery in the state remained legal through 1848. Two centuries later, the service is part of a growing effort to tell their stories, which are pieces of both New Haven and national American history.

Roughly 100 people attended, lifting the pair up in song, prayer, and collective reflection. Many of them are part of the nascent St. Luke's & Trinity Restoration Project, which seeks to rebuild healing and trust between the two churches. St. Luke's was founded in 1844, when a number of Black people split off from Trinity—where they were relegated to a section at the back of the church—and founded their own house of worship.

"The vision was a service that was rooted in our Christian faith but also spoke to the need for healing," said historian and author Jill Marie Snyder, who grew up in St. Luke's and discovered Lucy Tritton’s story while writing a history of the church around 1997 (she now attends Dixwell UCC). "It's time to acknowledge the pain."

"I view Lucy and Lois as trauma survivors," she added during the service. "Their ability to carry on and move from bondage to freedom with grace inspires me."

The Rev. Dr. Leon Bailey and Rev. Cecil Tengatenga.

That begins with the story of Lucy and Lois Tritton themselves, whose painful past can and should inform New Haven's present. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Lucy was kidnapped and stolen from her home in West Africa with her father and mother. From there, enslavers brought her to St. Thomas, where the Danish West India Company operated a slave depot in the port city of Charlotte Amalie through the mid nineteenth century.

Records show that enslavers sold Lucy and her father to a General R. Tritton, a ship captain who lived in London with his family.  At some point in the late eighteenth century, the Tritton family moved from England to Nova Scotia, in what was then the very nascent Dominion of Canada. That's where, in 1799, Lois was born. Snyder writes that she was recorded as the "enslaved ‘mulatto’ child' of Mrs. Tritton," a sobering reminder of the treatment of people as property that followed the creation of race and racism in the sixteenth century.

By then, Captain Tritton was dead; he drowned at sea in 1790 when his ship sank during a storm. But the Tritton family maintained their connections to New Haven, where they had owned a second home and attended Trinity Episcopal Church when it was still just a wooden building on the New Haven Green. In the years that followed Tritton's death, his widow Sara used the mother and daughter as collateral for a loan, which traded hands multiple times before the mid-1820s. Then in 1824, New Haven’s sheriff announced an auction on the New Haven Green, at which the two would be sold.

"Before being auctioned on the Green, Lucy and Lois were marched through New Haven’s downtown streets, led by a drummer, shouting, 'slaves for sale,'" Snyder remembered in a narrative that young parishioners read Sunday night. As the words rang out across the church, they felt freshly raw, like part of a wound that had been left not to mend and heal, but to fester and rot.

Arianna Chi Daniley-DeYounge, who read a section of Lucy and Lois' history, casts her confession into a bowl of water. 

In March of 1825, Lucy and Lois became the property of a Mr. Anthony Sanford, an ostensible abolitionist who purchased the women for $10 each. At the time, according to records in the New Haven Museum, Sanford issued freedom certificates to Lucy and Lois, which would have granted them emancipation (New Haven, by this time, had a sizable community of free Black people, notable among them engineer and entrepreneur William Lanson).

And yet "Lois, in her many interviews, never mentioned receiving a freedom certificate," Snyder recalled in her narrative. Instead, she was forced to work for Sanford for several additional years, eventually buying her freedom for $600. It was a cost she never should have had to pay: the Connecticut Gradual Abolition Act of 1784 meant that she should have been free after turning 21 years old. Or as Snyder writes: "It’s likely that Mr. Sanford paid off the loan that Mrs. Tritton owed, and, unknowingly, Lois repaid Mr. Sanford."

From that point, Lois worked alongside her mother as a laundress, marrying the Middletown-born Asa Jeffrey in 1832. While she had one son, a barber named Henry, the couple also lost two babies, said A. Joy Burns, a member of the Amistad Committee and the Yale & Slavery Research Project. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for another, their marriage dissolved sometime in the mid nineteenth century. Meanwhile, in 1844, Lucy Tritton became one of the founders of St. Luke's Episcopal Church, according to records that are still in the church's possession.

“The story of Lucy and Lois is not a story of uncomplicated freedom," said Rev. Heidi Thorsen, associate rector at Trinity, in a statement before Sunday's service. "Instead, it is a story that compels us to consider the reasons that Lois wasn’t simply freed at so many points along her journey, including after the auction and so-called emancipation. It is a story of state, regional, and national significance, inviting us to think about our ongoing commitment to the liberation of all people.”

Valarie Stanley and Geri Mauhs read "A Litany for Those Not Ready for Healing," by Dr. Yolanda Pierce. Stanley and Mauhs were both members of a small planning committee that helped put the event together. That group also included Snyder and Rev. Heidi Thorsen. 

Sunday, that was on full display as Snyder opened the service with her own story of ancestry and lineage, lamentation and healing, trauma and survival. Fifteen years ago, Snyder began looking into a centuries-removed relative, Henry Jones, with only a name and the knowledge that he had fled slavery in the South during the nineteenth century.

As she delved into research, she learned that he was born into slavery in 1819, on a plantation in the now-small town of Winchester, Virginia. When he was six, enslavers took him away from his mother and sold him to another household "as a wedding gift," Snyder recalled, her voice steady but thick with grief. In the 1840s, Jones fled, making the dangerous journey North until he settled in Elmira, New York.

"His obituary says that he waded through swamps and traversed mountains until he reached Elmira," Snyder recalled. "I was so moved when I read his story, I fell to my knees and cried. I sobbed. And at the same time, I was shocked by my emotional reaction."

Her historical research took a scientific bent (Snyder, who may be one of New Haven's most brilliant and inquisitive minds, endearingly self-identifies as nerdy). Snyder immersed herself in research around trauma, including the study of inherited, generational trauma known as epigenetics. The field, which has since become part of understanding things like preterm birth among Black mothers, informed both her understanding of history and her own trauma response centuries later.

"In the 1960s, New Haven was a model city for its redevelopment projects," she said. "Today, we can begin the work to make New Haven a model city for healing and racial reconciliation."

Bailey: "We have to begin to embrace that higher dimension of ourselves."

Those words echoed again and again through the service, from the pulpit to a quiet, candle-filled columbarium in the back where Black members were once required to sit. Taking the mic between hymns and selected scripture, young parishioners told the story of Lucy and Lois in four parts, their voices bringing a heavy, weighted past into New Haven's present. Reader  Arianna Chi Daniley-DeYounge, who sometimes attends St. Luke's with her grandfather, later said that she found the service meaningful for its deep dive into New Haven history.

Holding that message as he spoke, the Rev. Dr. Leon Bailey urged attendees to move past the very mortal silos in which they have placed themselves, and consider what it means to be connected as spiritual kin. Two hundred years after Lucy and Lois were kidnapped, trafficked, and kept in bondage for the color of their skin and their country of origin, Bailey suggested that the impulse to identify and categorize is still deadly—particularly when it is used to subjugate other human beings.     

"We are so enmeshed in our human identities that we cannot see who we are spiritually," he said. "We're not paying attention to where we are wounded. We have to begin to embrace that higher dimension of ourselves."

"We have to stop turning a blind eye to white privilege," he later added. "... It takes something to open ourselves up to healing and to acknowledge that we have the power to name it, and to address it, and to cure it."

In the silent 15-minute period for reflection that followed, attendees appeared to take those words very much to heart. Toward the back of the church, dozens lined up at the columbarium—now used to hold the ashes of congregants who have been cremated and interred in the space—to light candles for the millions of lives lost to and altered by enslavement. Nearby, people received prayers of healing and wrote confessions on slips of paper, dropping them into a heavy, thick crystal bowl filled with water.

Gillian Redeaux, who has attended St. Luke's since she arrived in New Haven from Saint Kitts as a teenager.

"It's bringing up feelings about the past and what slaves had to go through," said Gillian Redeaux, who has attended St. Luke's since she arrived in New Haven from Saint Kitts as a teenager. That was decades ago. Now, she said, she is hopeful for more moments that acknowledge New Haven's role in slavery and make genuine attempts at reconciliation.

In a similar "Litany for Those Not Ready for Healing," Mauhs and Stanley—who represent Trinity and St. Luke's, respectively—gave voice to those feelings on a larger scale. Reading the words of Dr. Yolanda Pierce, a professor and dean at the Vanderbilt Divinity School, the two decried the existence and impacts of racism, from the need for reparations to the state-sanctioned murders of Black boys and men at the hands of police officers.

God in your mercy/Show me my own complicity in injustice, attendees read in unison, their voices filling the nave and drifting up towards pews where the Salt & Pepper Gospel Singers sat behind the pulpit. Convict me for my indifference. Forgive me when I have remained silent.

It is, indeed, a reminder of how quickly New Haveners—particularly white New Havers—bury some of the city's more bitter and uncomfortable history because it doesn't fit the dominant narrative of a North that pushed back against slavery. Only recently have initiatives like Discovering Amistad and the Witness Stones Project helped spread knowledge around the state's complicity in the transatlantic slave trade and the historic, deliberate and continued disenfranchisement of Black people in New England.

Following the service, both Snyder and Thorsen, associate rector at Trinity, said that the event is the first step in a longer and more sustained effort towards healing, repair, and racial reconciliation between the two churches and in New Haven more broadly.

Iman Hameen. 

In the next months—Snyder didn't yet have a date—a planning committee hopes to raise funds and install a grave marker and proper headstone at Lois Tritton's grave, which sits in Blake Street Cemetery. On the Saturday before the service, members of Walk New Haven and the churches led a tour and wreath laying at the site, with context from family historian Sherill Baldwin.

In advance of this summer, Snyder is also working with the Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven (JCGNH) to honor Lucy and Lois in their annual celebration of Juneteenth. Sunday, JCGNH member and organizer Iman Uqdah Hameen said she is grateful for Snyder's work. When she arrived at the church Sunday, she carried with her a small Shona statue and door knob from a slave dungeon in what is modern-day Ghana.

"Although the celebration of Juneteenth is symbolic of true freedom for our people, it connects us to our ancestors and their emancipation in a real way," Hameen said in an email after the service. "We, as a people, know that we are still enslaved in many ways." 

Watch the full service above.