Boneyarn by David Mills

Abstract

Reviewed by: Boneyarn by David Mills Ilka Scobie (bio) boneyarn David Mills Ashland Poetry Press https://www.ashlandpoetrypress.com/online-catalog/other-books/boneyarn 144 pages; Print, $17.95 Along the city's jawline bythe wharf where a peck of slaveswere auctioned In 1630, one hundred enslaved Africans (one-third of the population) lived in New Amsterdam, soon to be New York City. By 1712 New York was an epicenter of the slave trade, and a cemetery was created for Negroes, enslaved or free, as well as Native Americans and indentured whites. About fifteen thousand bodies were unceremoniously buried there, and it was not until October 1991 that an excavation crew for a new federal building discovered the remains of 419 human skeletons. Thus was the African Burial Ground, the oldest and largest slave cemetery in America, unearthed. "See: all of us / now mothered by mother earth / and murder's milk." With a powerful trifecta of history, lyricism, and empathy, David Mills creates a sweeping poetic vision of this story. Voices of the enslaved Africans explore the fraught complexity, the abuse of power, and slavery's unspeakable horrors. One block from today's New York Stock Exchange a slave market thrived, and more enslaved Africans lived in New York than in any other American city except for the booming slave center of Charleston, South Carolina. Mills delves into a hidden history of pre-Revolutionary New York. Slave rebellions, early African American writers, interracial love affairs, colonial history—all are fodder for his poetic masterpiece. We learn that the kidnapped African-born slaves maintained strong teeth (some of which were sculpted into various shapes, indicating their African birthplace) but their enslaved children were starved on a carbohydrate diet, thus the toothless child corpses. "In the child graves, their teeth were almost always gone. / Cause they were the here born. The start / life. The too-often sugar and corn suppers." [End Page 116] The slaves were often buried with artifacts, buttons, bracelets, and beads, some of which were made in Africa. In the haunting poem "to the Bones; About the Beads: Talking," a forty-year-old woman's skeleton was found with beads belted around her waist. Using this fact as the basis for the poem, Mills presents the West African beads as the secret the woman wore throughout her enslaved years, a symbol of her ancestral heritage. "Imagine / feeling like you're carrying a country around your waist / … or maybe just clinched echoes of that ocean, salt / reminders of a white man's transatlantic tantrum." The reader is introduced to the profound shame of child slave chimney sweeps, their young bodies starved and deformed from the dangerous task of climbing up and cleaning narrow, creosote-infested chimney flues. "Started printcin' when I was I was six … My life up in nothin' but smoke." "My should-be-blooming bones squashed from twist and scrunch; limbs wrung from heavin' bags of soot twice my teeny self." Equally horrifying is the fact that the fledgling Columbia University students (some as young as fifteen) regularly robbed graves at the African Burial Ground, using the cadavers for anatomy class. "Talking to the Bones: Columbia Graverobber Victim" begins with the punch: "Who did this? Abuse's students." Continuing to delve into this travesty, "Autopsy's insights, legged real / estate could've properly been considered property. / Hell, at the end of the day, they were just homework." When free Negroes petitioned for the enslaved bodies to at least be treated with dignity, "the Bone Bill" would have stopped grave-robbing but was not passed by the Common Council (today's equivalent of the City Council). Dividing his book into nine sections, Mills excavates a hidden American history with intellectual vigor and grand poetic expansiveness. Thus he is able to introduce Phillis Wheatley in two poems. "An Almost Audience" details facts about the first published African American female poet. "Bought then brought on the Middle Passage but would one day read passages of her work in London." And in "Sable Marginalia" the brilliant writer and first Negro woman published in the New World is freed, but her "final days were spent shriveling / as a scullery maid / in...