Periwinkle

This is a story that I cannot tell. 

I cannot tell it for two reasons: because the historical record did not keep it, and because imagining it is not for me to do. 

On a mild March day, with watery sunlight and trailing high clouds, my daughter and I tramp the young woodlands and overgrown meadows around our farm, searching for traces. We follow the lines of lost roads, struggling through patches of greenbriar and holly, navigating around vernal pools and quick-running springs. We transmit our location by GPS to my mother, one hundred miles south. She tracks our route on old topographical maps with tiny red squares where structures used to stand. 

When I was a little girl in southern Maryland, one of my mother’s hobbies was to pull our green Volkswagen beetle over to the side of the road to explore abandoned houses. My sister and I sweltered on vinyl seats with the groceries, or, less often, picked our way through waist-high grass to peer through wavy glass windows and run our hands over crazed horsehair plaster walls with her. One such house stood next door to our home: a four-tiered manor house overlooking St. Patrick’s Creek whose ever more elaborate additions evidenced the growing fortunes of its owners. The side of the house that faced the water was overcome with creepers, collapsed in on itself by a ruthless vegetative reclaiming. The walls were crumbling, the stairs to the second floor impassable. The tangled woods around the house were filled with flowers. Here and there among the briars, clusters of daffodils and daylilies marked the seasons at the sites of long-vanished dwellings. Even more than the decaying manor house, these sites seemed haunted, their ephemeral but persistent stories encoded in the landscape.

These days, my mother has discovered a talent for historical research of a different kind. In her thirties, she gathered up handwritten appointment books and photographs left by strangers in falling-down houses. Now, she searches the online records of a new set of strangers with dogged persistence and relentless memory, weaving together threads long since frayed and cast to the winds. She pores over census data and birth and death certificates, plat descriptions that start with a rock and end with a tree in miniscule, almost illegible cursive, estate lists made up of buildings, implements, livestock, and enslaved people. Instead of musty paper notebooks that crumble in her hands, she leafs through digitized copies of tobacco books, warehouse inventories, and farm documents. 

When I try to help her, I make imaginative leaps from estate list to census, creating story after story based on nothing but a similar name. She is methodical, crafting what amounts to a series of stepping stone bridges over the quick waters of time. Each stone leads to the next. Where there are gaps too large to step safely, she probes for the right shape and size of evidence to fit. Here, a death certificate. There, the census data. Best of all, and rarest, a photograph. The bridge from past to present might not be complete, but it is passable, and safe. 

None of this work is about anyone we know. She searches for the records of the Peter family and the Black families who were enslaved by them and lived nearby after freedom, if they were fortunate enough to have escaped being sold. The link between us is the land where I live. Because we are too haphazard to help with the online research, Sadie and I are deputized to do the physical work. We walk the land, following the old boundary lines that run “from a rock… to a tree.” 

The historian Lauret Savoy, in an epigraph to her 2015 book Trace, reminds us that “every landscape is an accumulation. Life must be lived amidst that which came before.” This landscape, weathered and layered like the sedimentary rock lying beneath it, is filled with traces. Disheveled hedgerows outline the forgotten borders of parcels named ‘Conclusion’ and ‘Stick to It’. Old stone walls melt back into the earth, almost invisible under accumulated organic debris. Centuries-old witness trees guard lost map points deep in the much younger woods. Natural springs that have sustained communities since long before the division of this land bubble up from deep below the frozen earth in winter.  Burying grounds, with carved headstones and simple field stones etched only with initials, rise up from beds of spreading periwinkle at the terminus of abandoned roads. 

When Sadie and I arrive at the locations of the red squares on my mother’s maps, they are almost always marked with periwinkle. Periwinkle, sometimes called myrtle, Latin name Vinca, is not native to Maryland. It grows wild in Europe and the Caucasus, where it spreads through forests as a low undergrowth, its leathery dark-green leaves visible throughout the winter, deep blue flowers peeping through the bracken in spring. It must have traveled to the colonies or the new United States on some early ship, persisting in the woods around dwelling places and cemeteries where it earned a new name: forget-me-not. “Once established, it is difficult to eradicate,” according to Wikipedia. Even deer and rabbits, as they strip the leaves and bark of the plants around it, leave the waxy vinca to grow and spread in peace. 

Between 1954 and 1956, a major reconstruction of Maryland Route 190, also known as River Road for its proximity to the Potomac, moved the road slightly south. In the process, builders constructed a new bridge over Seneca Creek, which flows south through sycamore woods and farmland to meet the river at the remains of the Seneca Stone Cutting Mill and the C&O Canal. The relocation demolished the hulking grist mill that stood on the banks of the creek at Seneca Mills, and cut off Poole’s General Store from the main travel route. Old River Road still dips down from the newer blacktop to the gates of Poole’s Store, takes a sharp left turn to run through a ravine along a little branch that flows from the roots of an ancient maple tree, and climbs a steep hill through dark cliffs to its truncated end at  Montevideo Road. 

At the intersection of Montevideo and Old River, a patch of periwinkle blooms deep blue every spring, dotted with clumps of daffodils. The overgrown woodland surrounding it is laced through with forsythia, another introduced plant that still competes with the aggressive greenbriar and blackberry brambles. The land at this spot is rough and humped as if it covers debris, a little hollow protected by a low ridge on two sides, with easy access to the quickly flowing branch that runs under Montevideo Road from the estate spring house not far away.  

Montevideo was the name given by the man who owned its builders to a house and estate that commanded the highest point in the surrounding area, a few hundred yards northwest of the intersection of Old River Road and Montevideo Road. Its original land falls away to the Potomac in the south, down to Dry Seneca Creek in the north, Seneca Creek in the East, and a broad rolling plain of farmland to the west. The house was built around 1830 by artisans enslaved by John Custis Peter, the son of a family descended from Martha Washington who consolidated parcels of land with poetic names like “Long Looked for’s Come at Last” and “Father’s Gift” into a plantation of some 400 acres, taking its name from its view of Sugarloaf Mountain about 15 miles to the north.  

Peter did not live long at his estate, a tawny Federal structure that  took design inspiration from his family’s Washington home at Tudor Place. He died of tetanus in 1848, leaving the land and all his possessions to be divided among his wife and children. Among those were 24 enslaved people, listed in the inventory taken after his death alongside cattle, horses, silver spoons, bedding, and all the structures and tools necessary to support a farm of that size on the eve of the Civil War. 

Peter’s wife married again in what appeared to some to be an unseemly haste. The 1850 census, the first following the death of John Parke Custis Peter and the division of his estate, records Elizabeth Jane Henderson Peter and her new husband, the Reverend Charles Nourse,  living in dwelling 105 – likely Montevideo -- along with their blended families. The lines directly above the Nourse/Peter family identify a household of two: Harriet Beall, a free Black woman, aged 51, and her daughter Nelly, 13. The proximity of the entries in the census suggests proximity in space. Harriet and Nelly lived nearby, a distinct feminine dyad in a roster of large families headed by men. They are the only Black household listed on this page of the census, the only household composed solely of women. 

According to the records my mother has found, Harriet’s parents, Jeremiah Beall and Harriet senior, born around 1765, were freed by the estate of Robert Peter, John’s uncle, “for diverse good causes and considerations.” Jeremiah was able to purchase his daughter from the estate. In March 1812, when she was likely around 15 years old, Jeremiah signed a document to attest that “according to the last will and testament of my late Master, Mr. Robert Peter Junr., and for diverse good causes and considerations… hath manumitted, enfranchised and set at liberty, after she shall reach the age of 25 years, my daughter Harriet, who was born a slave, and has since become my legal property, by purchase out of the estate of the said Robert Peter.”

In 1849, an inventory of the land and structures associated with Montevideo, now being assessed to be divided among John Peter’s children, includes “near Seneca Mills a small frame house together with some apple trees.” Could this “small frame house” surrounded by apple trees have been Harriet Beall’s home, dwelling 104 in the 1850 census? Could this site be the same one that draws my eye every day at the intersection of Montevideo and Old River Roads, the disturbed ground tucked in the trees, guarded by a higher rise? 

In November 1861, Sarah Agnes Peter, John’s cousin, wrote to her brother’s wife in Buffalo, New York, about the preparations for a winter encampment of Federal troops in the area around Montevideo. “We have military friends still all around us and they seem to be busily engaged preparing for the winter fixing floors and flues in their tents - building stables &etc. Brother J remembers the remains at the old mill at Harriet’s - they have been hauling the stone ever since Saturday.” 

It is impossible to know for certain whether the Harriet of the old mill is the same one recorded in the census, but the house where Sarah Agnes lived — Montanverde, easily glimpsed across the Seneca Creek valley from Montevideo when the leaves are down in the winter — was an easy walk from the ravine, especially when the woods were cleared and managed for timber instead of today’s spreading tangle. Harriet’s house, near a tumbledown mill, was clearly a memorable landmark to Sarah and her brother James. 

I live today on the same land that Harriet walked and worked, and where she stayed for at least a little while with her daughter. The manor house, all polished banisters and deep sandstone windowsills, still asserts its dominance over the landscape, but it is surrounded and enfolded by a web of traces, tenacious reminders that the stories of this land are not contained by its thick stone walls. The enduring vinca and the annual jubilant flowering of the forsythia, almost lost in the briars, are subtle, persistent remnants of lives that defy paltry lines in inventory and census. “What is clear,” Lauret Savoy writes, “is that into the nineteenth century very few African American families came to possess land as their own property. I’ve wondered what deeper forms of possession, more concrete and felt, they had. Not finding their stories doesn’t mean they never existed. Spoken words, exhaled breath, are to me just as real as paper records. So is soil embedded in one’s palms. Or knowing the seasonal movements of hawks and salamanders.” 

I picture Harriet and Nelly choosing forsythia to plant around the house to brighten the dark ravine, daffodils to mark the coming of spring, periwinkle for remembrance. I picture them splitting firewood to stack against their frame house for the winter, their household of two small but sufficient, tucked away from the howling northwest winds that buffeted the manor house on the higher hills. There was no view of the mountain from Harriet’s window, only the stone mill, the apple trees, the landmark maple and the sparkling branch.

Harriet appears in the census records in 1840, 1850, and 1860. In 1860, just before Sarah wrote her letter, the census locates her in a new two-person household, living with another free Black woman named Harriet Devan in a different part of the district. There’s no documentation of Nelly — who would now be in her early twenties — living nearby. By 1870, Harriet is gone. There is no record of her death that I can find. The historical record is almost silent on her life. Nelly is also hard to find, as she likely changed her name if she married. There is a Nelly Green living in Sandy Spring in 1870, with a husband named George and a two-year old daughter named Annie. By 1880, George has a different wife and Annie has some new younger siblings, and Nelly too disappears from the records. 

My mother uncovered one more reference in the historical record to a woman who seems to be Harriet, though again the question of names confounds the story somewhat. On January 26, 1837, the Maryland General Assembly passed “an act for the relief of Harriet Green, of Montgomery county.” It is worth quoting here. “Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Maryland,” it reads, “that the clerk of Montgomery county court, be…authorized and empowered to issue a certificate of freedom to Hally, alias, Harriet Green, the daughter of Jeremiah Beall, a free man of colour, late of Montgomery county, deceased, who was entitled to her freedom before the act of eighteen hundred and thirty-one, chapter two hundred and eighty-one, in the same manner as if the said Jeremiah Beall had made, executed, and caused to be duly recorded, a deed of manumission to the said Hally, alias Harriet Green, prior to the passage of the said act of Assembly, and that the said Harriet Green be…hereby permitted to remain in the State, as a free woman, any law to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The act of 1831, chapter 281, passed into law on March 12, 1832. established the Maryland State Colonization Society, “whose duty it shall be to remove from the state of Maryland, the people of color now free, and such as shall hereafter become so, to the colony of Liberia, in Africa.” The MSCS Board of Managers lamented that “the evil of an increasing [B]lack population is pressing upon us, and the longer that we deploy to adopt measures to check it, the greater does the task become. The resources of the state are now amply sufficient for the removal of the whole of her free coloured population.” 

While short-lived, this dark, complex, and little-studied chapter in Maryland’s pre-Civil War history clearly had a chilling impact on free Black Marylanders like Harriet. Without more research, it is impossible to know exactly how many people were removed to Liberia without their consent, and how many may have emigrated voluntarily. Harriet, however, seems to have wanted to stay. Again, we can only speculate on why no certificate of manumission existed prior to her appearance before the clerk of Montgomery County and subsequently the General Assembly. Perhaps her father died before the certificate could be officially issued when she reached the age of twenty-five, around 1824. Perhaps she had no need of the certificate, living in the same place where she grew up, where she was known, until the passage of a law that sought to uproot her from that place and send her across the ocean. 

I also wonder about Nelly’s father. There is no census record of Harriet living with a man. Nelly carries the last name that Harriet gave the census-takers, her parents’ name.  It was the surname of another slaveholding family who owned the house next door to the Peters in Georgetown, and the name of a crossroads in Montgomery County a few miles from Montevideo. I wonder if Jeremiah Beall, when he gained his freedom, chose his own name? Or did he live his free days with a name that was given to him in violence?

Naming, though, can be powerful, magical stuff, and the repetition of names in Black families in our area through the centuries is intentional, a child’s name pointing back to an ancestor and passed down in power through the generations. However her own father gained his surname, Harriet gave it to her daughter without the intercession of another man. In the empty space that remains, we can conjure all kinds of stories of why, but we can never know the truth. Harriet keeps that secret, whether she wanted to or not. It is easy to see her as inscrutable, impassive, holding her strength and knowledge close to the vest - but it is critical to realize that this, too, is an illusion.  Harriet is silenced not by her own choice, but by a history that overlooked her. 

Harriet’s papers are not collected in the archives of Tudor Place. There is no portrait of her there or at Montevideo. I can’t know whether she stayed here after she was free to be close to someone who remained enslaved at Montevideo, or simply because this was the land that she knew, the flowers she planted that yielded no crop but beauty. I can’t know that the shady spot by the sparkling branch was hers. 

Her story is not mine to tell, but I can’t let her go. I try to pay attention, to hear her own voice tell it in the traces that she left on the land. All I know is that she endured, resilient as the low-growing forget-me-not. The lists, letters, and census entries that are the only traditional historical records of Harriet Beall’s life raise more questions than they answer. 

The sparse documentation of the lives of these two women is as common as the red clay earth on which they lived. My images of Harriet and Nelly in their house in the shady dell are baseless assumptions, romantic notions of the strength and endurance of a household of women in a time of violence and trauma. Sarah Agnes’s brief, tantalizing mention of “Harriet’s” house in the letter, one of the few non-census records of her existence, locates her in place: the spot by the creek, between the two manor houses that housed the dwindling fortunes of the Peter family. Even though we can’t allow the letter-writer  to grant Harriet anything - after all, Harriet is a free woman - the possessive makes me catch my breath. I don’t think that Harriet ‘owned’ her house or her land in a conventional, legal sense, although again, this is an assumption because the records simply don’t tell us. But it is clear that she took, she possessed, she embodied, that place. 

As we make our way through the brambles, my daughter and I are very close to the ages that Harriet and Nelly were in that census in 1850. But as Savoy notes, “[e]ach census is an enumerated instant giving little context or detail on the lives of these people or of their felt ties to place.” We can feel Harriet’s presence in the landscape, we can see her name in the census, but her story remains an enigma. Lauret Savoy: “Here I stop, having intruded unasked into this woman’s private hardship. No matter that it’s after the fact. Each census is an enumerated instant giving little context or detail on the lives of these people of their felt ties to place.”

The documentation of their lives is so spare, so fragmentary, that it calls out for imagination to fill in the missing pieces. But there is honesty and power in acknowledging the gaps, what no longer exists because it was specifically and intentionally not considered of sufficient importance to document. There is power in not filling them in, even when we long to do it, even when we crave a connection to the woman and her daughter planting flowers alongside the stream, a connection we long to build through imagery and poetry and imagination. There is respect in stopping, intruding no further where we were not invited.

To be honest, we haven’t earned the invitation. We haven’t protect Harriet or Nelly or their stories. These two women - or a woman and a girl, a woman my age, a girl my daughter’s age, a moment in the historical record, their feet planted right where mine are today - remain unknowable to us today because of our historical lack of attention to their story. 

The people who did not own monumental manor houses are no less present in this landscape. They were the planters, the tenders, the builders, the stewards, and the quiet voice of the land is their living legacy. The resilient memory of the natural landscape, layered with traces upon traces, endures and uplifts their lives despite their scant appearances in the historical record. We live amidst that which came before.