More than a few people have observed that the most finely wrought character in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown—even more exquisite than Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan or Monica Barbaro’s Joan Baez—is the 1960s Greenwich Village of production designer François Audouy. Like great Hollywood actors, New York City neighborhoods move through phases as they age, yet manage to retain their primordial nature. Audouy scratched at the corporate sheen of today’s West Village, tossed in some period trash cans and a few Coupe DeVilles, and revealed it once again as a place of protest and longing, of young people striving and old people withering, a place where calls for freedom and justice echoed from doorways.
It was much the same in the 1920s. The paintings of John Sloan emanate a similar energy, his famous Village nightscape balancing the weight of the brownstones against the lurid glow of electricity. Greenwich Village residents of that earlier era—Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, and John Reed among them—were as obsessed with the concept of freedom as Jack Kerouac, Dylan, and Baez would be.
Why?
The association of this patch of Manhattan with freedom turns out to be elemental—a fact that struck me when I was researching my book Taking Manhattan, about the showdown between the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the English who took it and renamed it New York. I focused on several marginal figures from the city’s earliest incarnation, among them a woman named Dorothea Angola.
As her name suggests, Dorothea came originally from western Africa. She likely arrived on Manhattan in 1627, a year after New Amsterdam was founded at the tip of the island, after a Dutch ship had waylaid a Portuguese vessel in the Caribbean, discovered enslaved Africans aboard, and hauled them northward: the first slaves of New York.
Slavery wasn’t part of the original project of the Dutch in North America. The institution evolved haphazardly at first. Perhaps with European indentured servitude in mind, the rulers allowed for the possibility of the enslaved working their way out of bondage. In 1644, Dorothea’s husband was one of 11 African men who petitioned for freedom for themselves and their wives, arguing that they had done their time. They were given liberty, but with strings attached—most diabolically, the threat that their children might be pulled back into servitude.
The freed Africans were given land—not out of kindness, however, but so they would have resources with which to repay their captors for the loss of their labor. Still, it was land: a place to be, and with it the promise of a future. Dorothea and her husband set about clearing theirs, a wilderness of oak, chestnut, and hickory, turning it into a homestead. After he died, she re-married and raised her children on her farm. As she approached her own death in the late 1680s—after the English takeover, in what was now called New York—she must have felt some peace in the belief that her children and grandchildren would continue to occupy it.
A few years later, however, a white man named Wolfert Webber bought up their acreage as well as the land around it, which had likewise been given to freed Africans and was collectively known as the Land of the Blacks. There’s no knowing the circumstances of this mass purchase, but it’s hard to imagine anything other than that the Africans were coerced into selling.
If Dorothea had lived through a period of relative calm and prosperity, the hammer was coming down on the Black people of early New York. In 1702 came the first of a series of slave codes, laws that restricted the lives of the enslaved. It also became harder for owners to free their human property. More and more, being Black in New York became synonymous with servitude. By 1730, 42 percent of households in the city owned slaves.
As I was researching my book, I plotted Dorothea Angola’s six acres on the grid of today’s city: Sullivan Street, Thompson Street, MacDougal Street … the very terrain that the folk singers and Beat poets would inhabit had been settled by her; it was where she put her hopes for her family’s future, and where those hopes were eventually dashed.
Does land hold memories? When the young Bob Dylan closed his eyes in his West Fourth Street apartment, did the injustices of three centuries earlier seep into his dreams? His generation posed a question to America about its trajectory and values. The answer may be blowin’ in the wind, but we seem to have a hard time hearing it.
Russell Shorto is the director of the New Amsterdam Project at the New York Historical and the author of the best-sellers Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob, Revolution Song: The Story of America’s Founding in Six Remarkable Lives, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Livable City, and The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America