Pinkster: A Commemoration Of Afro-Dutch Freedom And An Inquisition Of Racial Slavery In The North As A Diasporic Haitian

“When you look at [Black people]. . .who are diagnosticians of [our] society, you see the consequences of the colonial project. The trauma may not be as extreme or radical as in our case because we’re literally living inside this order, but I would still greatly qualify these positive assessments of African subjectivity.” — Saidiya Hartman & Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position Of The Unthought”

Members of the Pinkster band.

On May 16th I got a chance to go to Yonkers and see folks in the community come together and celebrate with people who were participants of Pinkster. When I first learned about Pinkster was through a mutual who was speaking about the historical and ancestral roots of Rap having been beyond its birthplace in The Bronx. I made a mental note about it because I had a general understanding about Hip-Hop and Rap emanating from West African cultural traditions. Pinkster, however, was more specific to commemorating former enslaved African captives in the Northern parts of the United States (e.g.: Vermont, Boston, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Philadelphia — namely, New York). Marquis Taylor in his essay, “Pinkster: A Celebration For Black New Yorkers” remarks:

The holiday known as Pinkster was introduced in the 1600s to the colony of New Netherland — a Dutch occupied region that encompassed parts of present-day Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The name Pinkster comes from the Dutch word for Pentecost, a Christian holiday celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter. In both the Netherlands and its North American colony, Pinkster was celebrated with music, feasting, and games — a tradition that would evolve to hold deep meaning for Black New Yorkers in the years that followed.”

The whole of what caught my attention was not just the connection to Rap music and history, but my experience of having been born in Nyack, a city in Rockland County that is part of the Hudson Valley region of New York. I may not have had any personal connections to Nyack, West Haverstraw, Blooming Grove, or Chester, or Brooklyn, but it goes without saying that as a diasporic Haitian, it is likely I may have ancestral connections to any one of these cities in the Valley and New York City. I’ve mentioned my upbringing in the Valley several times anecdotally, but not with as much excavational inquiry to situate myself with what I did not first acknowledge: the countless burial grounds of my enslaved Africans who sought freedom in the North — those of whom may very well could have been Haitian. The Africans who are still here and have always been here. Without understanding that history is not an isolated past happenstance and rather a concurrent flux of happenstances oscillating to and through the fictiveness of time, people think binaristically of the cartographies and geographies of the world, let alone the North when we account for racial slavery and its afterlives. In fact, we think little to nothing about racial slavery at all, if but still as a Southern phenomenon, yet there is a plethora of documentation that reveals what the white world of the North believes about Black people, specifically what members of a Dutch Reformed Church about Africans who wanted to be members of their congregation:

One document reveals the deep-seated racism of a Kings County–now Brooklyn–community. When in 1788 Dutch Reformed Church minister Peter Lowe received a request from a group of Black men who wanted to become full members in the church, congregants objected to admitting the men because, they claimed among others, Black people “have no souls,” “they are descendants from Ham, or the treacherous Gibeonites,” and “they are a species very different from us — witness their nauseous sweat, complexion, and manners & I cannot endure them near me. I would be asham’d to commune with them.”At the time of their objections, close to 75% of the free, white Kings County families enslaved people within their home.

Instances such as being exiled from the church, though this is one of many, were bundled up in the collective action of libations followed by storytelling, drum playing and role-playing in the jubilations Afro-Dutch peoples indulged in throughout their temporary reprieve from enslavement. The reprieve was not exclusive to active forms of refusal from the white master only by way of dance, music, and fun. Reprieve too, was followed by militant and strategic planning amongst one another to procure fellow Africans’ escape from enslavement. Many times they succeeded such that the Dutch colonizers grew suspicious of runaway captives. It was sometime after the American Revolution that the notability of the Afro-Dutch tradition of Pinkster was deemed too much of a threat to the public. As a result, in 1811, the council of Albany attempted to oversee Pinkster as a holiday for Black people:

In 1811, the Albany City Council passed the “Pinkster Law,” which made it a punishable offense “to march or parade, with or without any kind of music.” Violators faced a $10 fine or imprisonment for two to five days. Despite these legal restrictions, court cases and runaway ads suggest that Pinkster traditions continued to persist in more intimate settings.

Despite the white settler’s efforts, our people have remained true to ensuring the tradition of Pinkster remains intact. Unfortunately, much was left to be desired representationally. What I noticed about the Black participants is that they seemed to have to make the dissemination of Pinkster lore palatable for the white and nonblack viewers. This does not count the fact that for Black people, recapitulating slavery requires unfathomably copious amounts of psychic labor and energy. I didn’t know whether to feel dejected, angry, or overall distressed at why they reflexively policed themselves — yet I understood what was happening in the space.

A Black woman prefaced her storytelling with an urgency to vote in response to white revanchism by way of Trump’s second reelection and argued that Black people fought and died to vote. I was content to listen to her storytell in riddles and reference freedom songs from South Africans at the outset of Apartheid. I was also disconcerted to listen to her seemingly disavow Africans who did in fact not fight for the human right to vote, but without any equivocations, be free.

A white woman who was a professor brought her mixed race children and taught the audience some brief lessons on the history of Capoeira. At the end of her segment, she mentions that in spite of what Black people went through, she was thankful that the tradition of Capoeira was “given to her.” Evidently this should have been taught by a dark-skinned Afro-Brazilian person.

An older dark skinned Ghanaian man who played the drums alongside other Black people in his circle with his noticeably white settler wife who wore matching African garb remarked to me something along the lines of this humanist affect — this cathartic release people get when they play the drums. Unfortunately, we couldn’t talk more because he began packing his things afterwards.

Pinkster is essentially respective to Black Northerners who came together, celebrated, and fought their way through for their freedom. Blackness as a paradigmatic position, is not specific to cartography, which is to say that there is while Pinkster highlights Black people in the Northern region of the United States, I vaguely thought about the people of Kiskeya, the indigenous name of the land which belongs to the Taino ancestors and more specifically, the demographic of Haitians that moved to the Hudson Valley throughout the 1990s. Spring Valley, a city I was most familiar with growing up, had a large demographic of Haitians and I posit there are more of us in other pockets of Rockland, Orange, Ulster, and Sullivan County. Of course, this is partly conjecture. In spite of slavery being illegal in the Netherlands, a committee such as the WIC (West India Company), which comprised of the Spain and Portugal, then soon the Dutch, despite their warring against one another over profits and human cargo, invested in ships called the Bruynvisch — sailing off the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean:

In 1627, the Bruynvisch, a small ship part of a larger Dutch privateer flotilla, took on board twenty-two enslaved men acquired from among the cargo of a captured Portuguese ship in the Caribbean. The men were only some of the 225 African people on board the Portuguese ship but, with no Dutch system in place to import or sell large groups of enslaved people, the privateers had few options to profit off this kind of prize. They selected only the healthiest, most able-bodied men and planned to send them to a fledgling Dutch colony in Brazil. Prevented from reaching Brazil by strong Caribbean currents and under pressure to pursue more Spanish treasure ships, the flotilla captains changed plans. Extra cargo in the form of enslaved people would only hinder their attack plans, so the Bruynvisch left the group, sailing up to New Netherland in hopes of selling the men there.

The onus is not only towards the Dutch, but also the Spanish and Portuguese who traveled, pillaged, raped, killed and abducted Africans and subjected them to the relentless conditions of racial slavery. I ponder how many of those Africans were Haitian and Black American and what their interactions were like. Keeping in mind Pinkster’s inception in the 1600 and the forceful dispossession of Haitians who were moved out of their homeland by way of the U.S. occupation in 1915 to 1934, subsequently following the François Duvalier regime from 1956 to 1987 and The Great Migration in America that happened between 1910 to 1970, millions of Black people had been intermingling with one another, finding new ways to be — where countless instances of forms of proto-Pan-African sentiment flourished before it was given a name — where I, as a diasporic Haitian am able to take in stride and appreciate for what we are, what we have been and we continue to be, reminding me that all we really have is one another.

Support Patrick’s writing: cash.me | venmo | paypal

Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian nonbinary writer, music producer, graphic designer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His gender pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in The Library of Unconventional Lives, RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.