The Plymouth Colony Archive Project

Parting Ways

from
In Small Things Forgotten:
An Archaeology of Early American Life

© 1996 Copyright and All Rights Reserved by James F. Deetz
(New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday 1996; expanded and revised edition).

Cato Howe is not a name we will find in our history books. He fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill beside the other troops commanded by Colonel Prescott, but since he was but one of a large army, he shares his anonymity with all the other foot soldiers who have served their country's cause in countless battles from Lexington to Danang. Like them, he returned home after his release from the Army and lived out his life in a modest way. But Cato was different from most of his contemporaries both in the military and at home in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Cato Howe was black.

If archaeology is a vital contributor to our understanding of all of America's common folk, and what their life meant to them, it is doubly so in the case of our understanding of the black experience in America. Prior to the various emancipation actions, beginning in Massachusetts in 1783 and continuing into the nineteenth century, blacks

Our knowledge of Cato Howe and his fellow blacks of Plymouth comes from two sources: Fragmentary written records give us a partial picture, lacking in important details. A complementary body of information has been gained by excavating the site of the tiny community in which Cato Howe lived until his death, in 1824. The site of this community is known today as Parting Ways, named for a fork in the road leading from Plymouth to Plympton in one direction and Carver in the other. At the time of its occupation by at least four black families, it was called New Guinea, a fairly common term used over much of Anglo-America for separate black settlements.

Nothing is known of Cato Howe's early life, before his military service. There are references to a Cato in inventories prior to that date, since slaves were included with other taxable property. But Cato was a common slave name, and it is impossible to determine if any of these

Real Estate: None.

Personal Property: 1 cow, 1 pig, 5 chairs, 1 table, 2 kettles, 3 knives and forks, 3 plates, 2 bowls, ax, hoe.

Total Value: 27 dollars.

He stated his occupation as farmer in his deposition. If so, wresting a living from the land where he lived was a taxing job. Today, over a century later, the soil on this tract of land is gravelly and singularly unfertile. To complicate matters even further, he was troubled with rheumatism, and his bedridden wife, Althea, was seventy years old and unable to feed herself. Both had been given assistance by the town before he received his federal pension. Although it is not recorded, Althea Howe must have died shortly thereafter, since Cato married Lucy Prettison of Plymouth in 1821. Three years later, he died, and his estate was probated. His inventory has survived, and attests to his most modest circumstances, as follows:

After Cato's death, his wife remarried and moved to Boston.

Were it not for Howe's having served in the Continental Army, we would know hardly a thing about him. Except for his inventory and the town's granting him permission to settle on their land, all our knowledge of him comes from military-related records. Even less is known about the three men who were his neighbors in the little community of New Guinea. Had they not also been in the Army, we would know less still. Quamany enlisted at age seventeen and was discharged in 1783. Like Cato, he applied for a pension. Denied it in 1818, he finally received it in 1820, when his guardian, Nathan Hayward, stated that he was incapable of taking an oath, that he was without

Prince Goodwin is the only one of the four whose life before the war is indicated in any way. He was a slave, owned first by Dr. William Thomas and then by his son, judge Joshua Thomas. He spent only three months in the military and, deserting in 1777, did not receive his freedom, as did the others in 1778. He apparently returned to the Thomas household, since he stayed on as a servant to the judge's widow, and apparently divided his time between New Guinea and the Thomas household. He was married and the father of five children, but there is no record of his death.

Like Howe and Quamany, Plato Turner served in the Army until 1783 and applied for a pension in 1818. We learn little else about him from written records, save that his death is listed in the Plymouth church records in 1819. He was survived by his widow, Rachel.

The ninety-four acres of land on which these four men lived were provisionally granted to Cato Howe in 1792, although there is no record of an outright grant of title to him. The four men cleared the property, built houses, and resided there with the town's permission until 1824. By that time, both Howe and Turner had died. The town authorized the sale of the property in that year, referring to it as land "recently held by Cato Howe, deceased" and "formerly occupied by Prince, man of color." A map

In 1975 an archaeological investigation of the Parting Ways community was begun. Renewed interest in the tiny community and its inhabitants had been generated by a special town bicentennial committee on black history, and this group's efforts at first were directed at the cemetery. Its location had not been lost over the years, and as a part of the town's bicentennial program, volunteer groups landscaped the area. At the same time, the committee sought and obtained a vote at Plymouth town meeting to set the land aside for memorial purposes, including the area of the Parting Ways settlement. It was in this area that archaeological excavations were carried out.

If we were to rely only on the documentary sources for our knowledge of the life of the four men who lived at Parting Ways, we would have little on which to proceed.

When the site was first visited, the area later shown to have been the main center of occupation was grassy, with an occasional locust tree, in contrast to the scrub pine and oak that covered the remaining original ninety-four acres. There was only one visible feature, a large cellar hole heavily overgrown with brush. Initial excavations were directed at this feature and a slight depression in the ground a short distance away.

The open cellar hole had all of the appearances of having had a house standing over it in the not too distant past. There was a strong likelihood that it marked the location of the house of the last known inhabitant of the site, James Burr. Burr is known to have lived there in 1895, when a sketch of his life was published in the Boston Globe. Burr had an interesting life. He was born and educated in Boston. As a servant to a congressman, he lived in Washington and traveled to England. He later returned to Boston, where he worked as a barber, and in 1861 he moved to Plymouth and settled at Parting Ways. His reason for this

This information agrees with the location of a Burr house on the 1879 Plymouth map. Still there in 1895, at the time of the Globe article, the house stood until the early years of the twentieth century. In all probability, the cellar hole was of that house, but it was not until two informants came forth with new information that such an association could be proved. In the August heat of 1975, an elderly couple visited the site while digging was in progress. The man was ninety-one years old and remembered walking past the house as a child; this was in the last years of the nineteenth century. When the Globe article was written, Burr lived at the site with his widowed cousin Rachael and her three sons. The informant remembered a lady living there known as Rachael Johnson, her proper married

When excavations were completed on the Burr cellar and in the depressed area nearby, a clear and intriguing set of architectural features had been revealed. The site had never been disturbed by cultivation or other earth removal since it was lived on. As a result, both the focus and the visibility of the features were excellent. The Burr house had been built in two stages, separated by perhaps as much as thirty years. The initial construction had taken place long before Burr moved to the site, and in view of the relationship between the two men, it may have been done by Burr's grandfather, Plato Turner. This first, small structure was twelve feet square, as evidenced by perfectly preserved stone footings. These footings stood on an intentionally mounded earth platform. Artifacts in the fill of this feature and in the trenches that held the footings all point to a construction date at the turn of the nineteenth century, with creamware and pearlware fragments providing the most precise dating evidence. These footings immediately abutted the cellar, and the cellar was beneath a second room, producing an overall ground plan of two contiguous

Both sections of the footing showed extensive evidence of fire. Melted window glass, heavy charcoal and ash deposits, and large numbers of nails all attest to the house's having burned in place. A second informant, interviewed in 1976, said that he had used the area to pasture cattle and knew it quite well. He stated that the house burned in 1908. On the other hand, yet another informant recalls visiting Rachael's son Jesse, in a house measuring approximately fourteen by twenty feet, "around the time of the First World War." Also, he stated that this house was later moved to Plympton. Is this the same house? It seems unlikely that it is, since the Burr house is known from archaeological evidence to have burned. If it is not the same house, then somewhere in the area, as yet undiscovered, is a feature that is the remains of Jesse's dwelling. Such a seeming conflict is not at all uncommon when dealing with informants, and the discrepancy is mentioned to illustrate

Test excavations in the shallow depression nearby produced a sample of pottery all dating to the main period of occupation of the site, from circa 1790 through circa 1840. When these excavations were enlarged, the depression was found to be the location of another cellar. When completely exposed, mapped, and measured, it was a rather puzzling feature. Extensive excavations in the area surrounding the cellar failed to produce any evidence of footing trenches, post alignments, or any other sign of the building that had originally stood over it. Like the Burr footings and cellar, this cellar, too, was twelve feet square. An external bulkhead entrance had originally led into it, but, at some later date, that had been walled in. Two of the cellar walls were of dry-laid field stone, and two others had been covered with boards. This second cellar was filled with refuse and stone. The artifacts in this fill suggest an occupation date during the first half of the nineteenth century, essentially in agreement with the historical record.

We have seen previously that the mean ceramic date for the fill of this cellar is not in agreement with either the known period of occupation or with the terminus post quem provided by a stoneware jar known to have been made in Taunton, Massachusetts, at the Ingalls Pottery during the 1840s. The explanation for this discrepancy, that the pottery owned by the occupants of the site was acquired second-hand,

It was while this cellar was being excavated that a discovery was made that raised a number of important questions about the site and its inhabitants. Broken on the cellar floor were two large earthenware jars unlike any before encountered on a New England historical site. Eighteen inches tall, of red, unglazed, well-fired clay, their shape and physical characteristics immediately set them apart from the entire Anglo-American ceramic tradition. These jars were made in the West Indies, and served as sugar containers for shipment to various colonial ports. They are also said to have been used at times for storing and shipping tamarind, a West African cultivated fruit that was grown in the West Indies. By a striking coincidence, during the same season as the Parting Ways dig and again a

How the Parting Ways people came by these jars will never be known; they may have possessed them before moving onto the property or received them, with or without contents, later. But their discovery raised an important issue that bears on any African American site and its interpretation: What degree of African cultural survival can be detected and described when dealing with the material remains of African Americans at an earlier time in the country's history? It would be the height of ethnocentric arrogance to assume that people recently a part of a very different culture would, upon coming to America, immediately adopt an Anglo-American set of values, of ways of doing things, and of organizing their existence. The misleading factor in this case is that the materials with which they were forced to work were the same, for the most part, as those available to the dominant culture which surrounded them. Again we see a strong parallel with Language, in this case one that draws on comparable data. In the West Indies, blacks speak hybrid languages known as

In addition to the Burr house and the separate cellar, a third architectural feature was unearthed. Near the second cellar, another depression indicated the remains of some earlier structure. Upon excavation, it was found to be a rectangular pit, roughly eighteen inches deep, measuring twelve feet by nine. Postholes were evident at two of the four corners and at the midpoint of each long side. On the dirt floor were traces of mud walling. The structure that had stood there may not have been a dwelling house, but it seems to have been fairly substantial. Mud-wall-and-post construction is reminiscent of West African building methods, although it did occur in the Anglo-American tradition at an earlier time.

The architecture at Parting Ways provides us with the

We might suggest that the difference between twelve and sixteen feet is slight, within the range of normal variation. To be sure, there are Anglo-American houses even smaller than twelve feet in one direction, as witness the John Alden foundation of 1630. However, this latter building was quite long, so that the amount of square footage available is almost identical to that observed in the twentyfoot-square Allerton foundation plan. The difference in square footage in a twelve-foot square as opposed to a

In an article on the shotgun house, John Vlach compares these houses in the American South with those of Haiti, and both with West African house types.⁽¹⁾ The shotgun house is acknowledged as a true African American architectural form. Not only does the Burr house plan conform to the ground plans of shotgun houses, the dimensions are remarkably similar. Beyond this, there are differences. Shotgun houses have end doorways and distinctive windows, while the photograph of the Burr house shows a rather typical New England exterior. Again we see a case of using the material available but arranging it in a way that subtly and more deeply reflects the maker's cultural roots. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy calls the shotgun house an architecture of defiance, in that it is a case of blacks stating their heritage through their building tradition in the face of the dominant culture.⁽²⁾ The little houses at Parting Ways were probably no less, yet because of the poverty of their builders and the scarcity of material, perhaps the statement was not as blatantly made.

Other aspects of the Parting Ways community show the same differences, albeit not as clearly as the building forms. The settlement pattern, in which all four men

Another striking difference from contemporary Anglo-American sites is seen in the food remains recovered from the Parting Ways site. We have seen that sawing of bone, as opposed to chopping it, appears sometime in the

Parting Ways is a very special site, in that it was occupied by at least three families of African Americans who were free of those constraints which might have been imposed on them under the institution of slavery. However marginal they may have seemed to the dominant European community, they were able to organize their world on their own terms from the late eighteenth century onward. Such conditions did not prevail in the Plantation South, where the yoke of slavery was not removed until the time of the Civil War. And while African Americans on all of the plantations coped with the harshness of their condition, they did so in different and often covert ways. It is perhaps due to this difference that the Parting Ways residents left us with a subtle yet clear material statement of their way of organizing their lives. Each constituent element of the archaeological record from Parting Ways, taken alone, is not totally convincing, although powerfully suggestive. But

Prior to the excavations at Parting Ways in 1975 and 1976, the site was known only as the location of a tiny cemetery which was said to mark the graves of at least some of the inhabitants. A sign at the side of the road informs the reader that:

As part of a more extensive survey of the original ninety-four acres for National Register nomination, a large area paved with fieldstone was discovered, just across the road from the original settlement.⁽³⁾ As is customary with such surveys, excavation at that location was very limited, involving a single test trench fifteen feet long and two and a half feet wide. But excavations were not required to determine the nature of the feature; it was only necessary to remove the thin layer of leaves which had covered it over the years. What came to light was an area some twenty-five by forty-five feet in extent, covered evenly with closely packed cobbles. The southern and western edges of the paving were not sharply defined, but the eastern edge was much more distinct. The northern edge had been obliterated by the widening of the road in 1950. Almost seven thousand artifacts were found atop the paving, and for the most part were concentrated in two discrete areas. The vast majority of these artifacts were fragments of pottery, but there were pieces of shattered glassware as well. All had been intentionally broken on the spot, and as a result most could be partially or fully reconstructed. The pattern that emerged was one that called for comparisons with that associated with African American ritual practices and their West African roots. The two concentrations differed from each other. The more northerly one consisted of two sugar jars, a stoneware jug, miscellaneous pressed glass objects,

Throughout this area, African American graves are ornamented in a distinctive fashion. In Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner perhaps summed this up most succinctly:

. . . the grave, save for its rawness, resembled any other marked off without order about the barren plot by shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read.⁽⁴⁾

John Vlach tells us that there is a clear pattern in the types of objects used by African Americans to decorate graves.⁽⁵⁾ Bottles and jars predominate, sometimes broken in

Of course the Parting Ways site does not reflect the changes we have suggested for Anglo-American culture change, nor should it. Yet in its not fitting this pattern, it reinforces it, since it serves to draw a line beyond which explanation cannot and should not proceed. It tells us that such patterns are applicable only to the remains of a single cultural tradition, and once outside that tradition, other rules apply. During the digging of the Parting Ways site, this difference was brought home again and again when certain implicit assumptions based on our experience in Anglo-American sites did not work out. A large amount of dirt was moved in the name of solving this and that problem formulated from prior experience, and nothing came to light. The occupants of the site constructed their houses differently, disposed of their trash differently, arranged their community differently. But because the artifacts themselves were so familiar to us, the essential differences were disguised behind them, and only when a more basic consideration of different perceptions of the world was made did the picture come into focus.

African American archaeology has become an important and vital component of historical archaeology in the United States. Since the artifactual and architectural remains of these communities are a better index of the life of African Americans in their own terms, they hold great promise of supplementing American black history in a different and important way. Cato Howe, Plato Turner, Quamany, and Prince Goodwin seem like simple folk living in abject poverty when we learn of them from the documents. The archaeology tells us that in spite of their lowly station in life, they were the bearers of a lifestyle, distinctly their own, neither recognized nor understood by their chroniclers.

. . . . We have suggested that the inhabitants of Parting Ways, slaves who had been given their freedom and were thus able to express themselves through their material world, did so in such a way that their African heritage surfaced one more time. The ground plan of the Turner-Burr house shows rooms with dimensions close to those of both shotgun houses and earlier slave houses in South Carolina. The layout of the house differs from those of shotgun houses in the placement of the entrance, which we know from a photograph to have been on the long side of the building. This entry location is likely derived from the dominant, non-African architectural tradition of the region, but we must not discount another possibility. A house with two small rooms, entered from the side, is the basic form over much of West Africa. In addition, John Vlach writes:

The Yoruba architectural repertoire is quite extensive, ranging from common houses to palaces. But despite the variety, all of the buildings are based on a two-room module which measures ten by twenty feet . . . . This two-room house is essential to the Yoruba architectural system, and consequently wasnot easily forgotten even under the rigors of slavery.⁽⁸⁾

In our world today, other lessons gained from thinking about artifacts might be applicable. The little community of Parting Ways was probably seen by its contemporaries as simply a collection of houses occupied by people who for all intents and purposes were little different from them except for their station in life. Yet America was not a melting pot in the eighteenth century, and it is not one today. In their own way, the black settlers of Parting Ways maintained their cultural heritage in the face of adversity. And today people whose history has not been a part of the Anglo-American past hold similar cultural treasures in trust. We are not usually conscious of these other patterns, for our own culture is an awesome presence, but they are there.

1. John Vlach, "Shotgun Houses," Natural History, Vol. 87, no. 2 (1977), pp. 50-57.

2. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Autonomous Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), p. 120.

3. The following discussion is based on work done under the direction of Marley Brown III and presented by Constance Crosby and Matthew C. Emerson in a paper, "Identifying Afro-American Mortuary Customs: An Example from Parting Ways Settlement, Plymouth, Massachusetts," at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology held in Nashville, Tennessee, in January 1979.

4. William Faulkner, Go Down Moses (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 135. Quoted by John Vlach in The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 139.

5. John Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, p. 141.

8. John Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts, p. 125.