JOHN E. DOWELL, JR.
John Dowell’ s Cotton
By Brittany Webb
WHEN JOHN E. DOWELL, JR. SEES COTTON, he sees red. He sees labor— plantation slavery and all its attendant violences— the role it played in inventing Black Americans as a race of people, brutalizing ancestors physically, mentally, psychologically, fracturing family trees. He sees the way it underwrote the United States’ economic prowess, creating unprecedented wealth in places that largely escape the geographic association with American chattel slavery in our collective memory. Places like Wall Street, Central Park, and Washington Square in New York City. The physical violence of the harvesting practice and lived experience of enslavement, the psychic violence of dehumanization that extends past life into deaths marked by mass graves, the hypocrisy of churches and parks associated with a public good— these all haunt these cherished, seemingly innocuous public spaces. Dowell sees this violence and its erasure. Sees the haints and saints and wants you to see them, too. Dowell’ s Central Park is Seneca Village. His Washington Square is a sacred burial ground, his New York City a plantation. Historic churches appear in the contemporary city on blood-saturated soil.
Wall Street stands as a global symbol for New York’ s financial district and, by extension, American economic power. The fact that its name comes from a wall built by enslaved Africans in 1653 to protect Dutch settlers to New Amsterdam from indigenous natives and rival English settlers is a lesser-known history. Wall Street became the location for New York’ s first slave market in 1711, and historians estimate that 41 % of households in New York had slaves during the colonial period. While slavery in the urban northeast was not the plantation slavery of states further south, cotton was a cash crop that enriched the shippers and merchants in the north as well as the south, building financial institutions that helped make New York a global city. Dowell’ s photos remind us of cotton’ s role as a New York wealth generator by ensuring we see it as the grounds out of which these great institutions grew. Cotton is literal, figurative, and spiritual. It lies in fields, chokes Wall Street high rises, crowds the contemporary urban streets. It comes into focus, seemingly with arms and legs. It comes at you. It flies out of chimneys and church organ pipes, swirls about dreamy and menacing, and dares us to confront its soft and cutting histories.
20