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• 1 2020-01-21T19:27:50+00:00 Page 4 - Traces of Networks and Narratives 4 Bynum Page 4 plain 2020-02-19T16:56:09+00:00

  Lyndon’s account holders are notable slave traders, Jewish and Protestant merchants, enslaved servants and free persons in and around Newport who have come to him for various copying needs and food. For example, he lists two of Newport’s most notable slave traders, Christopher Champlin and Aaron Lopez. Both men come to Lyndon for bushels of beets and other sizeable quantities of food. Champlin, an Anglican churchgoer, is from a merchant family that made its money selling slaves and investing in slave trading voyages to the South Carolina and Georgia markets as well as to the West Indies. 8 Lopez is a Portuguese-Jewish trader and candlemaker who finances the building of Touro Synagogue as well as fourteen slaving voyages between 1761-1771; Lyndon’s friend and partygoer, Zingo Stevens is among those enslaved persons who helps build the temple just a few years before their pig roast. 9 On 28 March 1766, Lyndon pays 25s to Venter Childs for “killing and dressing” a pig. Childs is married to Sabina and buries his baby daughter, Ann in the “colored” section of Newport’s Common Burial Ground. On a Wednesday morning in May 1767, Lyndon lends ￡8 to Dinah’s husband, Hammand Tanner—enslaved to James Tanner—who later the same morning “returned back” part of what he owes; later, Lyndon notes that Hammand pays more of his balance due.  

  Lyndon intersperses listings of local events with his financial business; he lists the arrival and departure of various persons as well as local marriages and deaths. Lyndon gathers these stories that leave us to wonder about their plot or even their end result.  Lyndon makes note of his marriage to Sarah Searing, a little over a year after the pig roast, on the evening of October 6, 1767. In the weeks before their marriage, Lyndon remembers that he whitewashed Sarah’s bedchamber and “painted the wood work blue.” Searing and Lyndon are married just months after Zingo Stevens and Phylis: “Sunday about 2 o’clock afternoon July 20 1767 Mr. Zingo Stevens and Mr. Phylis Lyndon married by the Rev’d Mr. Edward Upham,” pastor of First Baptist Church. 10 There’s Phyllis Moffat’s trip, on “Sunday Morning Nov. 8th 1767 from Mrs. Searings onboard of Capn. Ingraham for a passage to New London abt. ½ after 6 o’clock in of Morning.” He doesn’t say why she leaves or if she’ll ever return, but her departure is worth remembering. There’s the mention his wife’s journey with her friend, Bess Thurston, to Bristol on a Tuesday in July 1768. They leave in the afternoon on their hours-long trip, up the island and across a waterway—most likely by way of a ferry ride. 

  Lyndon also accounts for his grief. Amidst the colony’s Stamp Act crisis and the subsequent Newport riots, Lyndon laments the death of his two-year old son, Pompey, who dies of the “bloody flux” on a Wednesday morning in September, 1765. (Lyndon’s son shares a first name with an enslaved man who also lives in Josias Lyndon’s household; the familial relationship is not clear. In 1783, the 27-year-old Pompey Lyndon is noted in the Book of Negroes; this census lists the names of 3,000 children, women, and men—many were formerly enslaved throughout the colonies—who choose to leave the United States after the Britain’s defeat in Revolutionary War. Because they have chosen to pursue England’s promise to provide freedom, land and economic opportunity to them, they board British ships with hopes to start a new life and head for various ports in Nova Scotia. Pompey Lyndon is part of this exodus and heads to Port Roseway, Nova Scotia. 11) When Lyndon’s son dies, he eulogizes his death in his account book: “Our little Darling Pompey was born ye 2nd Day of May 1763 taken ill in the night Thursday with the Bloody Flux Sep. 5 1765 and died Wednesday Morning abt. ¼ after 9 o’Clock being the 11th of said Sept. 1765.” Lyndon says just enough to witness his grief. He does not share this page with anything else (it’s not customary, in the mid-eighteenth century to waste paper in this way and Lyndon usually fills his pages).  He doesn’t use the rest of the paper write down a quick transaction or an arrival to port of an important person. It seems this page is meant to sit with his grief, and he underscores his note with a heavy weighted line of mourning. It’s the only weighted line among the extant pages of text. Its insistence seems to hold space for the baby because, even his choice of syntax must mourn with him.