Getting history right – making sure the story of America is told fairly and correctly – has always been a challenge in our country. History is a whole story that doesn’t leave out the parts that might be difficult to talk about, like the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans after Europeans landed on this continent in the 1600s, or the nearly 250 years – 1619 to 1865 – where slavery was a fact of American life and the reason for our Civil War, which claimed more than 700,000 lives.
In the aftermath of that war, some southern historians invented what has been called the “Lost Cause” narrative, one that turned the actual cause of the fighting on its head and made heroes of southern officers who violated their oath to the Constitution as U.S. Army officers and instead fought for the Confederacy.
When I wrote for Newsday, I published a series of stories about the men and women who lived in the farm labor camp that sat alongside the railroad tracks on Depot Lane in Cutchogue. No one had written about them before. There were here, and a part of Cutchogue – but they were largely invisible to everyone else.
Without this last group of southern-born, Black men and women, the potato industry could not have carried on. They did the hard work, but their stories weren’t told as part of the overall history of farming on the North Fork. They were here, but not here.
I wanted to change that. Along with a Newsday photographer, Viorel Florescu, I spent many months at the camp talking to the workers, learning about their lives, about how they ended up in this camp, and how they viewed the world around them.
The conditions inside the camp were abysmal. In all the time I spent there, I never saw a Southold town official at the site for an inspection; I never saw a Suffolk County Health Department or Labor Department official there. Had any of them gone, the camp would have been cited for health code and a host of other violations.
When one of the workers went home to South Carolina after decades in the camp, he had nothing to show for it – no money at all after years of hard labor. Not even pocket change. What amounted to a lifetime of possessions were stuffed into a single garbage bag. The lack of any concern about the lives of these people by both the town and county is a story of institutional neglect at a very high level. They should be ashamed.
But some people did step up. First, the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Library held a show of Viorel’s remarkable – and shocking – photographs of the camp and its residents. And Jan Nicholson’s Side by Side Foundation put up the funds so that the library could publish a book of the stories I wrote and the photographs that went with them. Jan, and the library, preserved history and in so doing, told the truth.
Mariella Ostroski, the library’s local history librarian, made all this possible. And Mark MacNish, the director of the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council, also stepped up. Mark is the first director of the council to acknowledge the role of slavery here. It is no more being ignored as if it weren’t here, or, even worse, that it was here but somehow benign.
In addition, Amy Folk, Sandy Brewster Walker and Richard Wines formed the North Fork Project to study the institution of slavery on the North Fork. They have uncovered hundreds and hundreds of names of the enslaved men and women who lived and worked here, and contributed in so many ways to the town itself. History is now, finally, being fully told.
For me, after the Newsday stories and the library book, All That Remains, were published, there was one last circle to close. I didn’t want to turn my back on the men and women I met in the camp without one final story.
The camp’s crew boss was a man named Jimmy Wilson. He was in the late seventies when I first met him. At first, he was reluctant to talk to me. No one had ever asked him about his life. He found it strange anyone would be interested him.
Over the months, he told me he was born in tiny Barwick, Ga., in 1918; that his grandfather, Shadrack Wilson, was born enslaved in the 1840s; that his mother, Ada Wilson, died when he was five or six and he moved with his grandmother, Julia Wilson, to a town in northern Florida where Julia’s brother lived.
When Julia died in 1932, Jimmy, barely a teenager, climbed about a pickup truck that took him to a farm in northern New Jersey. And thus began his life as a farm worker. It ended when he died in his pickup in Cutchogue.
He was adamant about never – ever – returning to Barwick, Ga. A number of reporting trips to that part of Georgia turned up the many reasons why he would not go back. Those stories are told in All That Remains.
After the camp on Depot Lane burned down, and he lost his longtime home, I told him I would take him to Barwick to live out whatever time he had left. He refused to go. After I told him I was going anyway, he asked me to find where his mother was buried in 1925 and, if it could be located, to place flowers on her grave.
I told him we could do that together. He refused. It took even more months to find the burial spot of Ada Wilson, but my wife and I went there and put flowers on the flat, long abandoned patch of ground next to a Baptist Church. There were no grave markers telling the names of those buried here.
But the circle didn’t close with that gesture. I had talked to him enough, and found enough information in Georgia, to understand what he would have experienced had he made that journey. So I turned that into a novella, a work of fiction. It’s called, simply, Mr. Wilson.
In its own way, fiction has a way of telling the truth – historical truth and emotional truth. I wanted Mr. Wilson to reach those goals. A southern literature website, Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, has now published this novella. It can be bought at books.by/porchlight.
Now, finally, the circle on this camp, on these men and women who were ignored for too long, has closed.
Steve Wick is a Cutchogue author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent nearly four decades as a reporter and editor at Newsday. His books include the nonfiction works Bad Company, Heaven and Earth: The Last Farmers of the North Fork, The Long Night and All That Remains, as well as his debut novel, The Ruins, and his latest work of fiction, the novella Mr. Wilson.
