The house is located in an area of Christiansted that is forgotten, abandoned both physically and psychologically. It is a part of an amnesia in our social memory. Why? Most people when they ask where the house is and I begin to tell them, don't have any visual references in mind. Their images and memory stop at about Company Street. Through my research I've learned that the town was designed to have a social, commercial and even racial divide. All the main buildings that had the most importance to colonial commerce were located near the waterfront. The laborers were placed in areas in the back streets. The first freed blacks were placed there by law in the 1700's as a form of urban segregation and control. How is it that we don't remember them? Them, the people who worked extra hard on Sundays, their only day off, week after week, to purchase freedom for themselves or for a loved one? How is it that we don't remember them?
Christiansted has always been a beautiful town to me. I always drove up through the back of town to get through the traffic. Some of the houses looked like there were still there from the 1800s...wooden and dilapidated..and occupied. My grandmother was born in one of those homes in Christiansted...a home birth.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I remember as a child when we lived on Hill Street for a few years.
ReplyDeleteVaughn Audain