On the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands (USVI), coral limestone harvested from shallow coral reefs and quarried from bedrock by enslaved Africans lay at the foundation of eighteenth- through twentieth-century structures. Due to the coral stones’ durability, many of the structures built by enslaved Africans are still scattered across rolling hills, valleys, and urban centers throughout the island, with edifices worn away, exposing the coral interiors. Today, these structures are the very homes in which people continue to live and the churches where they worship, and—as this article will highlight—some have been transformed into the school buildings where children receive an education. By exploring three distinctive encounters with the colonial past mediated through coral architectural stones, this article concerns itself with how archaeologists and other heritage studies professionals contend with quotidian temporal collapses on heritage landscapes that hold African Diasporic histories on the island of St. Croix in the USVI.
Within this article, I argue that the afterlife of slavery on St. Croix is pervasive and experienced in tacit ways exemplified by quotidian encounters with the colonial past through coral structures still on the landscape today. Centering Saidiya Hartman's (Reference Hartman2008) conceptualization of the “afterlife of slavery,” alongside Tianna Bruno's (Reference Bruno2023) expansion on Hartman's work with in her concept of the “biophysical afterlife of slavery,” this manuscript considers the biophysical materiality of the afterlife of coral. It explores how coral stones—ubiquitous in colonial-era structures throughout the Caribbean—act as both tacit and explicit mnemonic devices rupturing notions of linear time, and it bears witness to the everyday persistence of colonial violence. These ruptures in linear time illuminate the always present wake of slavery, to pull from Christina Sharpe (Reference Sharpe2016), making legible Black colonial subjection that continues to scaffold people's everyday lives today. On St. Croix, coral stones are being used in what I will call both “tacit” and “explicit” meaning-making practices among environmental conservationists, archaeologists, and local artists—all of whom are forging differing relationships to the ecological materiality of the afterlife of slavery. In the pages that follow, I meditate on how archaeologists must account for the palimpsestual specter of colonialism imbued in common everyday objects, such as coral stones, within our research designs, excavation, recovery, analysis, preservation, and dissemination practices. Drawing from Kevin Quashie (Reference Quashie2012), how can archaeologists seek Black livability within the material remains of the afterlife of slavery? Within this article, I am interested in exploring how archaeologists contend with the everyday materiality of the afterlife of slavery.
On St. Croix, colonial-era structures made of coral stones were quarried from bedrock and shallow coral reefs likely by enslaved African people who were knowledgeable about coral species, canoe construction, and masonry. In 1758, Reimert Haagensen, a Danish overseer on the island of St. Croix (then a Danish colony), recounted how coral, which would later be used as architectural material, was harvested from shallow coral reefs near the shores of St. Croix through the use of enslaved labor. He wrote that “two slaves row a boat from shore to the reef, or as it is called, canoe, where five to six other slaves are standing, breaking off the stones with thick wooden sticks. When the boat arrives they fill it with the stones. While the boat is returning to shore with those stones, the slaves loosen the other ones until the boat returns” (Haagensen and Highfield Reference Haagensen and Highfield2003). St. Croix's geological history has been documented since the mid 1800s (Hovey Reference Hovey1839; McLaughlin et al. Reference McLaughlin, Gill and Van den Bold1995; Whetten Reference Whetten1966). Notably, the earliest accounts from geologists (Hovey Reference Hovey1839) point toward the quarrying of soft limestone consisting of fossilized coral that was likely formed 20 million years ago. Such formations, in addition to coral mined from shallow reefs surrounding the island, comprised colonial-era building material. As Clyde Woods pointedly wrote, colonial expansion and conquest enthroned a “worldview [which] saw the ecosystem in all its biodiversity as isolable and exploitable parts: forests became timber, deer became fur, water became irrigation, and people became slaves” (Reference Woods and Sanderock1998:43). To Woods's ecological insights, I would add that throughout the then Danish West Indies, coral stones—like the bodies of enslaved Africans, soft and malleable—were conceptualized as “isolable and exploitable parts,” becoming the architectural material on which the island's plantation economy resided. Colonial-era buildings constructed from coral were erected to withstand hurricane-force winds and the wear and tear of the brutalities of African enslavement. Enslavers, overseers, and the enslaved had homes constructed from coral limestone quarried from shallow reefs and bedrock that contained recognizable exact coral exoskeletons on their surfaces (Figures 1 and 2). Sugar processing factories, windmills, animal corrals, churches, and hospitals were also constructed using coral stones throughout the colonial era on St. Croix, making such structures tacit quotidian reminders of the colonial past (Haagensen and Highfield Reference Haagensen and Highfield2003; Odewale and Hardy Reference Odewale, Hardy, Delle and Clay2022).
Overseer's house at the Estate Little Princess, made from coral stones. (Photograph taken by the author.)
Closer image of coral stone in overseer's house at the Estate Little Princess. (Photograph taken by the author.)
Within this work, I define “tacit coral encounters” as the often unspoken and understudied connections that the presence of coral limestones signal to the long-lasting impact of colonial violence. These encounters occur at all kinds of sites of everyday life and business, but this article will focus on two in particular. First, we will explore the Estate Little Princess, an eighteenth-century Danish sugar plantation owned by the Nature Conservancy, which operates out of the historic structures on-site that have weathered facades that reveal coral stone edifices. Second, we will explore schools built on plantation landscapes and those built into former plantation structures made of coral stones. What I conceptualize as “explicit coral encounters” are seen as intentional and active engagements by various actors to use coral stones to speak directly about the legacy of slavery in the present. I explore explicit coral encounters through the archaeological work my colleagues and I do at the Estate Little Princess and through the monumental artwork of local artist La Vaughn Belle. Within this work, tacit and explicit coral encounters are not dichotomies that oppose one another; rather, they are terms used to highlight how coral as a mnemonic device can point to the legacy of slavery—specifically, the condition of African enslavement—which may be either readily received by an observer and intentionally created for engagement in the present (explicit) or not registered by the observer yet still present and not intentionally created for engagement (tacit). Regardless of whether the signal was registered by an observer, I argue that the collapse of the past into the present still takes place, given that the biophysical afterlife of slavery makes itself known in the lived conditions of Afro-Crucians and the continued degradation of the environment.
With St. Croix being designated as a National Heritage Area in December 2022, there is renewed public interest across the island in the material remnants of slavery still visible on the island's surface and subsumed underground and underwater in the archaeological record. The National Heritage Area designation, signed into federal law, is specific for lived-in landscapes that hold important national narratives about the history of the United States. This designation was pushed through US Congress in large part because of the initiative of House of Representative delegate Stacey Plaskett, who was determined to have the territories that comprise the USVI recognized for their historical significance by both local residents on island and the country as a whole (see Rodriguez et al. Reference Rodriguez, Wallman and Honychurch2024 in this edited issue to read how Dominican communities maintain connections to revolutionary ancestors through the landscape and continuing cultural practices). The passing of such legislation, with rightful proclamations of the historical significance of St. Croix's past, must also contend with the present-day realities Virgin Islanders experience that link Black people's subjection during the Danish colonial past to the United States's imperialist present (Dunnavant et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2018; Navarro Reference Navarro2018, Reference Navarro2021; Poblete Reference Poblete2021).
Colonization's physical and material impacts—the exploitation and extraction of environmental resources inextricably tied to the conscription of Indigenous displacement and usurped Black livability—continue from the colonial period into the present. St. Croix was inhabited 2,500–3,000 years ago and was initially named Ay Ay (meaning “the river”) by Taino residents who made the island their home around 1,500 years ago (Dunnavant, Flewellen, and White Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen and White2017; Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2017; Dunnavant et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2018; Flewellen et al. Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones, Odewale and White2018, Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones and White2020; Hardy Reference Hardy2008, Reference Hardy2009). The name was indicative of the rich freshwater sources that flowed throughout St. Croix prior to European colonization, which brought about the introduction of monocrop agricultural economy based on sugar cane, which in turn resulted in the degradation of both soil and waterways on the island. For Afro-Crucians on the island of St. Croix today, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment”—what Hartman (Reference Hartman2008:6) articulates as the symptoms inherent in the afterlife of slavery—permeate the quotidian. Centering on buildings made of coral that have been repurposed for environmental conservation efforts and K–12 schools, I highlight tacit temporal ruptures that collapse linearity between the past and present. Bruno (Reference Bruno2023:1543), building on Hartman's work, states that “the biophysical afterlife of slavery” articulates “how the precarity and devaluation of Black life have affected the biophysical environments in which these lives exist.” Bruno brilliantly calls for scholars to examine beyond anti-Black social, political, and economic processes ingrained in the afterlife of slavery and to expand their research to simultaneously explore how “the degradation and environmental impact of anti-Blackness are also ecological and biophysical processes” (Bruno Reference Bruno2023:1544). Mapping Hartman and Bruno onto the Crucian landscape, this article illuminates colonization's physical and material impacts as a continuation from the colonial period into the present.
The Colonial History of the Estate Little Princess at the Intersection of Coral Reef Restoration and Heritage Preservation
On St. Croix, one tacit ecological encounter with the biophysical afterlife of slavery can be witnessed in shallow-water coral reefs surrounding the island, which have increasingly been dying off at alarming rates. With global attention shifting to ocean sustainability, the worldwide decline in coral species and restoration efforts has received renewed focus and hypervisibility in public discourse. At the start of 2021, following the United Nations Decade of the African Diaspora, the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development was declared (Hein et al. Reference Hein, Mcleod, Razak and Fox2022). As global efforts are poured into the sustainability of our oceans, it is important to weave together connections between the ocean and African diasporic populations, particularly the impacts of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the plantocracy that followed on our oceans and oceanic lifeforms. Coral reefs are the life source of our oceans, yet all across our planet, they are dying at astonishing rates. Although covering less than 0.2% of the seafloor and supporting at least 25% of marine species, coral reefs support the foundation of tourism and fishing economies across the Caribbean (Hein et al. Reference Hein, Mcleod, Razak and Fox2022; Hughes et al. Reference Hughes, Baird, Bellwood, Card, Connolly, Folke and Grosberg2003; Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Lustic and Bartels2011; Souter et al. Reference Souter, Planes, Wicquart, Logan, Obura and Staub2020; Veron et al. Reference Veron, Hoegh-Guldberg, Lenton, Lough, Obura, Pearce-Kelly, Sheppard, Spalding, Stafford-Smith and Rogers2009). Within the last three decades, more than half of the world's corals have died, and scientists have estimated that 90% of coral reefs might die within our lifetimes (Hughes et al. Reference Hughes, Baird, Bellwood, Card, Connolly, Folke and Grosberg2003; Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Lustic and Bartels2011; Souter et al. Reference Souter, Planes, Wicquart, Logan, Obura and Staub2020).
In May 2022, the Nature Conservancy (TNC) officially opened its Coral Innovation Hub on St. Croix to address the decline in coral populations and work on innovative experiments in restoration. TNC, founded in 1951, is a global environmental conservation nonprofit and the largest environmental nonprofit in the Americas. TNC is also the second largest landowner in the United States, after the US government. The Caribbean Regional Headquarters for the TNC is on a former eighteenth-century Danish sugar plantation called the Estate Little Princess. I, along with four other archaeologists, have conducted archaeology at the Estate Little Princess, and in partnership with Archaeology in the Community—a nonprofit centered on K–12 archaeological education—have hosted a youth field school that is dedicated to training middle and high school students and that is based on St. Croix archaeological theory and method since 2017 (Dunnavant, Flewellen, and White Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen and White2017; Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2017; Flewellen et al. Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones, Odewale and White2018, Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones and White2020, Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, White, Jones and Pierre2023). At the Estate Little Princess, TNC's Coral Innovation Hub, facing the reality that the Caribbean is on the front lines of the disastrous impact of the disappearance of coral, is creating new scientific techniques for coral restoration. Staff members are doing this work against the backdrop of historical colonial violence against the environment as well as violence against Black people who lived and labored at the estate during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Work by Shapiro and Rohmann (Reference Shapiro and Rohmann2005) demonstrates that within 12 years, from 1991 to 2004, drastic shifts in coral populations occurred on the southwest coast of St. Croix, likely in connection with runoff from farmlands. Additionally, there are studies that have focused on soil exhaustion from the monocrop production on other islands in the Caribbean, such as the work of Wells and colleagues (Reference Wells, Pratt, Fox, Siegel, Dunning and Murphy2018) in Antigua; however, the connection to the impact runoff from agricultural production has on coral reefs has yet to be fully quantified. While Shapiro and Rohmann were using satellite imagery from the late twentieth century to ponder the impact of agricultural production on coral reefs within the span of 12 years, the result of 200 years of intense monocrop production during Danish colonial rule must have had a long-lasting impact as well. However, rhetoric within the field of coral reef restoration continues to point only to twentieth-century human-induced impacts on coral populations as the cause of coral bleaching events and stony coral disease. It is clear from eighteenth-century writing that there was a colonial belief that “the reefs surrounding the island produce a limitless supply of coral stone” (Haagensen and Highfield Reference Haagensen and Highfield2003). More work needs to be done to explore how the human impact on coral populations has a deep history in the Caribbean tied to colonial practices of coral mining for building materials that paved the way for large-scale agricultural production on St. Croix by the Danish in the mid-1700s.
Currently, the archaeological work I have codirected at the Estate Little Princess since 2017 highlights the intersection of environmental conservation and cultural preservation needs. Whereas we as archaeologists focus on the lifeways of Afro-Crucian people who lived and labored at the site during the colonial era, the TNC work at the site centers on environmental conservation efforts. Doing cultural preservation work with this backdrop allows us to think past twentieth- and twenty-first-century human impacts regarding diminishing coral species, because we see the remains of such species in the building material of the enslaved people's homes we excavate. The traditional coral-restorations rhetoric is expanded on at the Estate Little Princess, given that historic carved coral stones—visible in the edifices of buildings scattered across the plantation landscape—signal the colonial ties to environmental degradation, violent Indigenous displacement, and African enslavement, all of which lie at the unspoken foundation of present-day calls for coral reef restoration. Slowly but steadily, the TNC staff at the Estate have begun to think about their work in the context of the historical legacies of colonialization. It is hard to imagine that staff at TNC were not able to make those historic connections, given that the structures they operate out of are built of the same coral species they now work tirelessly to propagate.
Currently at the Estate Little Princess, numerous historic structures in various states of restoration and ruin sit alongside innovative experimentations in environmental conservation efforts led by the TNC. The surviving historic structures at the site include the enslaver's house, hospital, overseer's house, sugar factory, rum distillery, sugar mill, well tower, and several outlying buildings, including the remains of an enslaved laborers’ village. It should also be noted that a watchhouse was removed from the site and later reconstructed at the Whim Museum to aid in sharing the island's colonial history. The historical buildings at the site, which contain blocks carved from coral stones, cover a construction history that spans more than 200 years (Wright et al. Reference Wright, Lader and Chapman1980). Just 16 years after Denmark purchased the island of St. Croix from the French in 1733, Danish governor Frederik Moth established the Estate Little Princess in 1738 to operate primarily as a sugar plantation. At its height in 1771, it was home to 141 enslaved individuals who lived and labored on 80.9371 ha. (200 acres) of land used to produce sugar.
After the 1848 abolition of slavery in St. Croix, the Estate Little Princess continued to operate with low-wage laborers, who lived in conditions akin to slavery (Dunnavant, Flewellen, and White Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen and White2017; Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2017; Flewellen et al. Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones, Odewale and White2018, Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones and White2020). The plantation started to fall into disrepair during the first half of the twentieth century, along with the general decline of sugar production on the island. It ceased to function as an active plantation and sugar factory before the start of the twentieth century, with Afro-Crucians still living in the formerly enslaved village area well into the 1930s. In 1949, 200 years after its initial inception as a sugar plantation, the Estate Little Princess was sold to Clayton and Opal Shoemaker as a summer home (Dunnavant et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2017).
The former enslaver's home and hospital building at the Estate Little Princess are the current offices, classroom, and storage spaces for the TNC. The outbuildings, sugar factory, rum distillery, windmill, well tower, and enslaved peoples’ village rest in ruin due to lack of preservation. As with other plantations and historic buildings on the island, many of the structures were fashioned with a combination of lime and coral tabby, as well as coral blocks mined from the nearby shallow coral reefs. The juxtaposition of the historical landscape of the past and the present-day environmental conservation efforts of the TNC on the island of St. Croix are mirrored by the related intersection of two discourses that are not usually in direct conversation with one another: historic preservation and environmental conservation. Ongoing archaeological work in the enslaved village at the site conducted by archaeologists affiliated with the Society of Black Archaeologists has worked to tie the colonial past to the present (Dunnavant, Flewellen, and White Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen and White2017; Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2017; Flewellen et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2018, Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones and White2020, Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, White, Jones and Pierre2023).
The Estate Little Princess was willed to TNC in 1991. Despite being the second-largest landowner in the United States, TNC does not have a centralized department that manages issues concerning historic properties that exist on the lands it stewards. As a result, funding for initiatives centered on preserving historic properties is not prioritized. As a result, the standing structures in the former enslaved village area, along with buildings associated with the production of sugar, continue to fall into disrepair.
Nonetheless, discussions that intimately tie TNC coral reef restoration efforts and the colonial legacy of coral mining have been cultivated at the estate since the onset of archaeological work. These discussions culminated in the commemoration of the TNC's new Coral Innovation Hub at the Estate Little Princess on May 2, 2022, where I spoke about the history of the estate, tying the colonial history of coral mining at the foundation to present-day calls for studies on the decline of shallow corals in the waters surrounding St. Croix. Although the extent to which coral mining occurred around the island has yet to be quantified, forthcoming fieldwork by Justin Dunnavant, one of the codirectors of the archaeology project at the estate, and Isiah Bolden, an oceanographer and assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, will be conducting geochemical analysis of the coral species found in historic structures and samples from historic quarry and shallow reef sites. These samples will be used to compare to species of coral in steep decline around the island. The hope is that such data will strengthen hypotheses that draw more evident connections between the underwater and terrestrial environmental degradation during the Danish colonial period.
The Estate Little Princess, the Caribbean regional headquarters for the TNC, can be understood as a case study for how the afterlife of coral can show up in both tacit and explicit encounters. Prior to connections being raised via archaeological work at the Estate Little Princess, staff members (mostly white) moved in and out of repurposed colonial buildings that now were offices and conference rooms, where their coral encounters were only tacit; coral was not discussed by TNC staff. It was archaeological research at the site that led archaeologists to ask TNC staff questions about the presence of coral limestone in historic structures, bringing tacit coral encounters from the background into the foreground and making them explicit. With TNC staff operating out of buildings made of quarried coral stone built by enslaved labor, the Estate Little Princess is an example of the legacy of environmental extraction that undergirded the Danish colonial period. Efforts toward coral restoration on this layered landscape collapse time, highlighting the persistence of past colonial violences in the present moment.
Tacit Colonial Encounters: Schools Made of Coral
In addition to the afterlife of slavery witnessed in the connection between historic coral mining and present-day coral restoration efforts at the Estate Little Princess, the afterlife of coral can also be seen through an intimate exploration of educational landscapes on the island of St. Croix. The schools on St. Croix are composed of architectural elements from former plantations, making them a powerful example of quotidian tacit colonial encounters. Following the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, thanks to the support of historian George Tyson, I visited several schools on St. Croix connected to plantations on the island. During the summer of 2019, while completing fieldwork at the Estate Little Princess, the team and I welcomed a visit from students taking a summer course through the University of the Virgin Islands Caribbean Cultural Center. While touring the Estate Little Princess and sharing the history of sugar production and forced labor at the site, one of the younger students shared a story about her experience as an elementary school student on the island. She stated that it was rumored that the place where students were held for detention had been a jail cell for enslaved Africans when the site functioned as a plantation. I was intrigued by her story—not because I was interested in whether it was true or false—but because it was a narrative in circulation by students attending a school located on a former plantation. From this encounter, I began researching school sites on the island to explore their connection with colonial plantation sites.
Due to the onset of cash crop agricultural production on St. Croix, the island was quickly divided into subplots for cultivation in the mid-eighteenth century. The result was that most of the land was altered to produce sugar and cotton. St. Croix was divided into nine quarters and subsequently divided into several plantation plots. Due to the ubiquity of these plots, it is not surprising that all of St. Croix's 10 public schools and 12 private schools today would be operating on former plantation landscapes or have ruins of plantation buildings on their campuses. For example, AZ Academy, a private K–12 school, was constructed next to the ruins of Estate Orange Grove (Figures 3 and 4). The academy was open for 19 years before—to the larger point about ecological vulnerability—closing its doors in 2018, after sustaining damage in the previous year's hurricane season.
Former campus of AZ Academy. (Photograph taken by the author.)
Ruins of Estate Orange Grove on the former AZ Academy. (Photograph taken by the author.)
St. Croix has more than a 200-year history of public education on the island, where some of the earliest “country schools” for Black youth were erected in late 1787, called Danish Government or Lutheran schools (Lawaetz Reference Lawaetz1980). One of the earliest Danish schools, constructed to educate enslaved children, is still an educational facility today and resides on the former La Grand Princess Estate Plantation (Figure 5). In 1853, the Ordinance for the Regulation of Country Schools in the Danish West India Possession from the king of Denmark, Frederik VII, outlined the structure that mandated free compulsory education of Black and white children. This ordinance was built off pre-emancipation legislation in 1839, a little under 10 years before emancipation, which implemented the free and forced education of enslaved children, with planters and parents subjected to fines for children who did not attend school (Lawaetz Reference Lawaetz1980). The Danish education system was built on the work of Moravian missionaries from the mid-1700s on the island, who had a long history of teaching Africans and their descendants how to read, write, and recite bible verses in efforts to spread their religious doctrine (Hall Reference Hall1992; Hüsgen Reference Hüsgen2016; Lawaetz Reference Lawaetz1980; Murphy Reference Murphy1977; Samuel Reference Samuel2021, Reference Samuel2023).
Late nineteenth-century image of school on St. Croix. The Grand Princess School would be constructed in the same style. (Courtesy of the Danish Royal Library Archives.)
For the purposes of this study, I am interested in the present-day schools that have repurposed historical structures and how those practices of repurposing mirror what Katherine McKittrick (Reference McKittrick2013) calls “plantation futures” rooted in a logic that works to discipline the Black body and dominate the natural environment. Within a call to explore plantation logics on St. Croix, I am interested in illuminating the tangible linkages between past colonial structures geared toward Black subjectivity and the present-day structures that uphold them. An example is the Lew Muckle Elementary School on St. Croix, built atop the Queens Quarters Estate 26, known as the Sion Farm Plantation, a former eighteenth-century Danish sugar plantation. Unlike the La Grand Princess school, which historically functioned as a site for the education of enslaved youth during the colonial period (Figure 5), the Lew Muckle Elementary School campus is built in and around the former Queens Quarters Estate 26's sugar processing factory, overseer's house, and windmill. These are areas of the plantation where the most arduous and dangerous forms of enslaved African labor took place (Students of Lew Muckle Elementary School 1976).
The Queens Quarters Estate 26 was purchased by John Madox in 1738 from the Danish West India and Guinea Company, and it encompassed over 161.874 ha. (400 acres) of land during the late 1870s. At its height in 1782, the Queens Quarters Estate 26 accounted for 304 enslaved laborers (Students of Lew Muckle Elementary School 1976). The plantation changed owners throughout the mid-twentieth century, and it ceased producing sugar in the 1950s. The present-day Lew Muckle Elementary School was erected on the former plantation site in 1970 among the buildings formerly used for sugar processing (Figure 6). Figure 7 shows the bronze plaque on the library's facade that reads “The Lew Muckle Elementary School Library, formerly the Boiling Station of the Queen's Quarter Estate #26, Built during the 1700s.”
Inside the library at the Lew Muckle Elementary School on St. Croix. (Photograph taken by the author.)
Bronze plaque at the Lew Muckle Elementary School outside the library. (Photograph taken by the author.)
In 1976, as part of the bicentennial celebration of the American Revolution, teachers and administrators collaborated with historians to conduct research about the former plantation and its inhabitants (Students of Lew Muckle Elementary School 1976). They discovered that what is now the Lew Muckle School office was once the home of the overseer and his family. The eighteenth-century former overseer's home now houses the school's administration, which oversees the production of student education at the site. The cafeteria in which Crucian youth now eat lunch was previously the building that housed work animals at the former estate. The bell tower, which was reconstructed in the 1970s by the Department of Education, had previously been used to manage the workflow of enslaved Africans at the site. The school's current playground sits alongside the ruins of the former windmill, which had been used to extract juice from sugarcane (Figure 8). A colonial landscape that once disciplined and commodified enslaved Africans is now a site used to educate and discipline Afro-Crucian youth. Both landscapes are sites of disciplining Black bodies to be viable in society, either as commodities in the past or citizens in the present. Here, it is essential to remember that residents of St. Croix are citizens of the United States; however, no one on the island is eligible to vote in US elections, leaving residents disenfranchised. This plays out on the educational landscape in varied ways.
Playground at the Lew Muckle Elementary School in the foreground, with ruins of windmill in the background. (Photograph taken by the author.)
Rinaldo Walcott reminds us that the afterlife of slavery, which he theorizes as the “long emancipation,” plays out in the circumvention of Black life “in the bellies of slave ships, the corridors of airports and schools” (Walcott Reference Walcott2021:107). Walcott's addition of schools to the areas where Black life is undermined can be connected to early twentieth-century scholars, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who connected the education of Black people directly to social and economic mobility (Du Bois Reference Du Bois1903). Zooming in to the USVI specifically, Jessica Samuel has written pointedly that the United States' ongoing project of imperialism can be seen in the efforts to undercut education in the USVI—most notably with the omission of a public high school on the island of St. John (Samuel Reference Samuel2021). Samuel's work makes connections between the 22.8% of USVI residents living in poverty and the lack of access to education for residents by tracing difficulties in educational access and the precarity of citizenship to the early prohibition of self-governance that followed the wake of the transfer of the then Danish West Indies to the US (Samuel Reference Samuel2023). More recently, calls for change to education in the USVI have centered on how Virgin Island history and the histories of the larger Caribbean are not taught in K–8th-grade classes. Many Virgin Islanders would like the Department of Education to create a separate course for middle and elementary school students rather than subsuming such topics under civics classes that prioritize mainland US history. These calls, too, are couched in desires for the priorities of the Department of Education to be more reflective of the communities it serves rather than beholden to educational standards set by the United States Department of Education. I would argue that these calls from residents are rooted in a desire to call out the legacy of prohibitive self-governance that is at the foundation of the Territory's relationship with the United States, where the circumvention of self-determinacy, symptomatic of the Long Emancipation, makes itself known in the grade school curriculum. Suppose the Long Emancipation plays out in sites of education, as Walcott asserts and Samuel exemplifies. In that case, we must consider how schools are designed to reify structures of oppression that precede them.
The Lew Muckle Elementary School, as both a heritage site and educational campus, collapses time. Although the colonial past at the Lew Muckle Elementary School is encountered daily on the campus by students and teachers alike, these encounters are tacit. They come in many forms: the plaque on the library building naming the history of the landscape, while more explicit interactions with that history, such as stand-alone courses guaranteeing its transmission in a classroom setting, are left out of elementary school curriculum. Similarly, this can also be witnessed more closely when we return to the young student whom I encountered in 2019 while excavating at the Estate Little Princess. Although she did not mention any explicit teaching about the history of enslavement in her educational settings, she and her peers had tacit encounters with that history daily via the ruins on their educational landscape. In the absence of explicit instruction regarding the history of the educational landscape in which students spent a significant portion of their day, students created stories to fill in the gaps, which I would argue, is the effect of temporal collapse. These sites of temporal collapse beckon us to consider how plantation logic undergirds the imperial project of the United States and requires us to question what freedom looks like in the present, when our children learn atop landscapes steeped in stratigraphies of violence.
Another form of explicit coral encounter occurring at the Estate Little Princess is through the youth field school that we hosted each year of excavation. This field school is a key component of archaeological work at the Estate Little Princess, which is led in collaboration with Archaeology in the Community, a nonprofit organization focused on archaeological education of students and teachers (Dunnavant, Flewellen, and White Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen and White2017; Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2017; Dunnavant et al. Reference Dunnavant, Flewellen, Jones, Odewale and White2018; Flewellen et al. Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones, Odewale and White2018, Reference Flewellen, Dunnavant, Jones and White2020). This field school, I would argue, works to make explicit the tacit ways Virgin Island history is experienced by school-aged children. The program was designed to meet community requests for youth involvement in archaeological work done at the site. However, the training session was built in alignment with the island's science education and history curriculum. The program attracts middle and high school students across the island of St. Croix through a partnership with the Caribbean Center for Boys and Girls. Although none of the students who participated over the five years of the program execution have come from the Lew Muckle Elementary School, it is worth noting that during the intake assessments of students, many do not come with an intimate knowledge of the colonial history of the island, particularly the intimacies of enslaved life. To this end, I have begun conducting ethnographic interviews with teachers on St. Thomas and St. Croix, along with adult community members who have attended elementary school on these landscapes, to gain a deeper understanding of how plantation landscapes have shaped educational and teaching experiences. Preliminary results have shown that many elementary and high school teachers are engaging in additional labor, beyond the limited scope of the curriculum provided to them, to teach Virgin Island history in creative ways, particularly through the arts.
Explicit Colonial Encounters: Coral Sculptures as Artwork
Archaeologists and environmentalists on St. Croix are not the only ones working to make otherwise tacit encounters with the past more explicit—making coral hypervisible as a medium in straightforward ways. Artist such as La Vaughn Belle and Chalana Brown have been doing this work for some time (Agostinho et al. Reference Agostinho, Dirckinck-Holmfeld and Grova Søilen2019; Belle et al. Reference Belle, Holly A. Smith and Singh2020; Cramer Reference Cramer2021). Belle, who is based on St. Croix, produces artwork aimed at explicitly signaling the biophysical afterlife of slavery by using historic coral stones as a medium. In this way, the encounter with coral as a temporal rupture is declarative and intentionally curated—articulated here as explicit.
Belle, raised in the US Virgin Islands and currently residing in St. Croix, states that her work “makes visible the unremembered” (Reference Belle2023). Pulling from architecture, history, and archaeology, Belle's pieces directly ask how the colonial past makes itself known in the present. In so doing, her artwork asks that society attune itself to these registers of slavery's legacy to address ongoing injustice toward African diaspora populations. Although I am focused on Belle's work with coral, her artwork spans mediums, including performance art and visual and sculptural works (Belle Reference Belle2023).
Turning toward Belle's work with coral, we can see how this organic material pulled from the ruins of colonial buildings on St. Croix makes the afterlife of slavery explicit as witnessed through coral limestone architectural blocks. No longer contained to the weathering edifices of colonial era buildings, coral stones in Belle's work are pulled from their tacit presence in the background of quotidian life and brought to the foreground. Belle's 2015 work titled Trading Post: Articulated Hierarchies and Visible Displacements is a sculpture made of coral stones encased in Plexiglas (Figure 9). The coral stones encased in Plexiglas were “reclaimed,” as Belle puts it, from the ruins of historical buildings in Christiansted, one of two urban centers on the island of St. Croix. This reclamation process is layered. Not only is Belle reclaiming historic building material no longer in use at colonial ruins, many of which stand on properties she owns, but she is also reclaiming that past. Belle claims those materials and the past as the foundation for the present moment and asks how such reclamation can be empowering instead of subjectingfor Black residents. Belle states, “Reclaiming the stones from ruins and abandoned structures [Trading Post] mediates the space, object, and history, showcasing the labor of the often forgotten enslaved population and laboring class and inverting the hierarchy of the visible narrative” (Reference Belle2024). Coral as mediation is at the core of the piece as Belle makes visible explicit connections between past exploitative labor practices and extractive environmental practices with the current precarity of Black life and environmental sustainability that St. Croix faces.
La Vaughn Belle's work Trading Post. (Courtesy of the artist.)
In 2018, following the creation of Trading Post, Belle co-created the 7.3152 m (23 ft.) tall statue titled I Am Queen Mary with Afro-Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers (Belle and Ehlers Reference Belle and Ehlers2023; Grøn Reference Grøn2022). The original statue is made of two core components: a 3D representation of labor revolt heroine Mary Thomas and a plinth consisting of coral on which the figure sits. The original statue, depicts the St. Croix 1878 labor revolt hero Mary Thomas. Mary Thomas, known as the revolutionary Queen Mary throughout the Virgin Islands, led one of the first labor revolts in Danish history, calling an end to slavery-like conditions for Black residents on the island of St. Croix in 1878, 30 years after the abolition of slavery in the Danish West Indies. There are no official images of Mary Thomas; however, the artists created a sculpture of Mary Thomas by blending theirfacial features and body frames into a 3D model (White Reference White2023). The monumental statue stood in front of the former colonial West Indian Warehouse in Copenhagen, Denmark, from 2018 through 2020, until it sustained damage due to a winter storm (Figure 10). The former West Indian Warehouse used to be the main entryway for Caribbean goods into Denmark during the colonial era. The plinth of the statue still remains in its original position in front of the former West Indian Warehouse. Built atop Belle's previous work, the plinth makes explicit the violent extraction of environmental resources made possible by enslaved and, later, low-wage Black laborers.
Image of I Am Queen Mary statue. (Photograph taken by Nick Furbo; courtesy of co-creator and artist La Vaughn Belle.)
The erection of the I Am Queen Mary statue is particularly significant given that it predates the summer of 2020, which saw the fall of many statues that memorialized European colonization across the globe. Equally important is the place of the I Am Queen Mary statue following the Rhodes Must Fall movement that led to the removal of the British settler colonist Cecil John Rhodes statue in 2015 from the University of Cape Town campus. Still, even after the fall of Rhodes in 2015 and global discussions that have followed regarding the erection of Black- and Indigenous-centered monuments—made hypervisible again following 2020—there are few statues of Black women in Europe. I Am Queen Mary was the only statue of a Black woman in Denmark, making the tribute a declaration of the labor of Black women that remains underacknowledged on the present-day European landscape.
Belle's work makes hypervisible the ways coral mediates the rupture of linear time. Within Belle's work, coral is a mnemonic device that makes the afterlife of slavery explicit. As art and artifact, coral highlights how Black labor in the past and present is foundational to the wealth produced by colonial and now imperial enterprises.
Conclusions
Coral remains a reminder of colonial violence encountered every day by the Black and Brown residents of St. Croix, who still live precarious lives in the wake of slavery in this US territory. As an architectural artifact, coral is the starting point of this exploration. This article examines three distinctive encounters with the colonial past mediated through coral, demonstrating how this organic material ruptures notions of linear time and demands that archaeologists tend to the persistence of colonial violence at heritage sites—whether they be materials uncovered through archaeological investigation, repurposed for school campuses, or used in the creation of new artwork. Placing Hartman's (Reference Hardy2008) and Bruno's (Reference Bruno2023) work in conversation with heritage studies, this article concerns itself with how archaeologists and other heritage studies professionals contend with temporal collapses on landscapes that hold African Diasporic histories.
I conclude by asking heritage studies scholars how we account for the palimpsest nature of heritage sites. How do we contend with the novel and familiar objects, such as coral stones, imbued with many histories and meanings by various disciplines? How do we contend with the afterlife of slavery within our research designs, excavation, recovery, analysis, preservation, and dissemination practices? How is it that we seek Black life through the material remains of the afterlife of slavery? These questions are explored here from multiple angles, by environmental conservationists, by archaeologists, within the communities impacted by our research, and by community members and artists, all of whom forge differing relationships with the materiality of the past.
Acknowledgments
I want to start by thanking George Tyson, one of my most incredible supporters, who jump-started this work by giving me a tour of the historical school campuses on St. Croix in the summer of 2022. I am thankful to Gunvor Simonsen at the University of Copenhagen for inviting me to workshop an extremely rough draft of this article at the beginning of 2023. Gunvor and the postdoctoral fellows in her lab gave me invaluable advice in the early stages of conceptualizing this work. Matt Reilly has cheered me on since I first presented this work at the University of Michigan in early 2022. I am grateful for La Vaughn Belle, who has become a sincere friend and thought partner in this work. I am also grateful to be in an intellectual play with Justin Dunnavant around this work since we first set foot on St. Croix together in 2016.
Funding Statement
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were generated or analyzed in this study.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
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