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The Freedom Business:
Connecticut Landscapes Through the Eyes of Venture Smith
through June 24, 2007
Click HERE to hear Marilyn read her poems.
Visit the Calendar for related programs.
 Marilyn Nelson
Photo by Doug Anderson
The Freedom Business features poems by Connecticut’s Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson that were inspired by the life of Venture Smith (c. 1729-1805), a former slave who purchased his freedom and that of his wife and children. The poems are paired with paintings from the Museum’s collection to help visitors imagine the landscapes in which Venture traveled, toiled, and eventually triumphed. By using the very personal media of art and poetry, the exhibition offers an intimate approach to a complex period in Connecticut and American history. The exhibition is organized by the Florence Griswold Museum in association with Soul Mountain Retreat of East Haddam, Connecticut. The Museum is grateful for the support of Connecticut Humanities Council and Pfizer.
A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa: But Resident Above Sixty Years in the United States of America. Related by Himself.
Printed in New London by C. Holt at the Bee-Office. 1798.
Courtesy of the New London County Historical Society, New London, CT
An Introduction to Venture Smith
Venture Smith was born in the 1720s in what today is Ghana. His name was Broteer Furro, and he was the first son of a king. He was about six years old and enjoying an idyllic childhood when his community was captured by an army of black slave traders.
After seeing his father tortured to death, little Broteer was separated from his family and sold, for a length of cloth and some rum, to the ship's steward aboard a Rhode Island slaveship. Robertson Mumford named the child Venture.
Venture Smith’s Tool Chest
Pine with rope handle
18 3/4 x 40 3/4 x 17 inches
Courtesy of the East Haddam Historical Society, East Haddam, CT
For the next three decades, Venture worked on farms in New England and on Fisher's Island, off the coast of Long Island. Legendary for his size, strength and endurance, he had a succession of owners before being sold to Colonel Oliver Smith of Stonington, a successful West Indies trader and a personal friend of George Washington.
For the sum of 71 pounds, Smith later freed Venture, who thereafter called himself Venture Smith. By then in his mid-30s, Venture bought the freedom of his two sons, Cuff and Solomon, and they worked together, farming and cutting wood on Long Island and in Connecticut, to buy the freedom of Meg, Venture's wife, and Hannah, his daughter.
During the American Revolution, Venture and Meg moved from Long Island, where they owned land, to Haddam Neck. They owned 100 acres on the Connecticut River, and Venture became prosperous. He farmed, fished, shipped lumber and other goods, and owned 20 boats.
In the late 1790s, Venture dictated his life story to a former soldier and schoolteacher named Elisha Niles, and this autobiography was published in New London in 1798.
Entitled A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa but Resident above Sixty Years in the United States of America, Related by Himself, his slender narrative encompasses his childhood in Africa, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the long years in slavery. Venture also describes the prejudice that followed him into life as a freed man.
Venture died in 1805 and Meg, whom he married for love and bought with his own money, survived him by just a few years. They are buried in the churchyard of the First Church of Christ Congregational in East Haddam. Angels are carved on their headstones.
The 17th-century house in Stonington Point where Meg and Venture lived as slaves still stands, as does the house in Stonington Borough, where Venture worked for Oliver Smith.The land they owned in Haddam Neck, and where their home once stood, is being excavated by archaeologists. Venture's vivid and harrowing "Narrative" is considered one of the most important surviving records of an enslaved man in colonial America.
The Collaboration
When Connecticut’s Poet Laureate Marilyn Nelson opened Soul Mountain Retreat on Baker’s Lane in East Haddam, just north of the Lyme border, she echoed what Miss Florence had done over a hundred years prior. By opening her home and inviting aspiring poets from all over the country to live and work in the nearby woodsy landscapes and rock-strewn meadows, Nelson updated Miss Florence’s Old Lyme boardinghouse where, for nearly three decades, artists stayed while spending their days filling up canvases with images of the marshes, the old village, and the rolling farmlands of Lyme.
Shortly after the Museum was introduced to Marilyn Nelson, the wheels for a collaborative project were set in motion. Nelson mentioned that she was interested in writing about Venture Smith, the slave who had lived in her adopted town of East Haddam, but whose published narrative recorded that he moved up and down the shoreline to earn the money needed to buy his and his family’s freedom. Clearly, a selection of paintings from the Museum’s collection could help to imagine the historic landscapes in which Venture traveled, toiled, and eventually triumphed.
After reviewing the hundreds of paintings in the Museum’s collection Nelson winnowed her selection down to a prized baker’s dozen that would inform and propel her writing. Devoid of people for the most part, but not of human influence, the chosen landscapes provide intimate and often idealized settings for the very real and often terrible episodes that make up the Venture Smith story. Only in a few instances were paintings selected because they resembled elements in the narrative—a couple on the riverbank who might be conspiring to escape, or a firey glow through a farmhouse window that might be evidence to a burning whip. The other painted places, from a snowy bend in a country road to neatly tended farm fields, were chosen for their subtle allusions to more specific locales. Moreover, the seasonality of the paintings was considered in order to imbue the selection with a sense of passing time.
Nelson uses a duet of paintings and words to retell the tale of Venture Smith in Connecticut. The pairings are arranged chronologically according to the events listed in Smith’s published narrative, beginning in 1751 shortly after his arrival in Connecticut and continuing until he was able to purchase his freedom as well as that of son and daughter, around 1790. A fourteenth poem by Nelson provides a prologue. Shown without a Connecticut painting, How I came by my name reminds us that Venture Smith’s story begins in Africa, before his capture, and transport to America. Through this collaboration of art, poetry, and history we hope to open new doors to the understanding of Connecticut’s complex history.
--David D.J. Rau, Director of Education & Outreach
Florence Griswold Museum
Gregory Smith, Moonlight, c. 1914
Whispered Plans (c. 1751)
by Marilyn Nelson
After my master hanged me by my wrists
on the cattle-gallows, I decided to resist.
My master owned a certain Irishman
named Heddy, who had formed a plan
to run away. He confided his plan to me
and two other Irish men
over a jug of poteen:
We’d steal ourselves and go west, where a man could be free.
We filched two firkins of butter, six wheels of cheese,
and a batch of bread. We bundled up our clothes
and met past midnight on the moon-dark shore.
Pushing off Master’s boat, we swore
an oath of loyalty, come what might come.
We put in at Montauk first
,all of us dying of thirst:
No one had thought to bring drinking water from home.
Heddy instructed our mates to prepare a meal
whilst we sought water. After walking a while,
he said he had something important to say
to our comrades, and walked away.
He went straight to the boat, and stole it and our clothes.
Sensing that this could be
my opportunity,
I caught and accused him of planning our revolt.
Heddy was jailed. At the end of the year I was sold.
Thus ended Heddy’s plan to explore the world
west of the Mississippi: a paradise
he wished to see with his own eyes.
We had sailed east, in a catboat with a gaff-rigged sail,
led by a fool whose dreams
were painted-over schemes.
I knew, as he whispered his plan, it was doomed to fail.
Louis Paul Dessar, The Wood Chopper, 1906
Work-Song
by Marilyn Nelson
I went to sea for seven months,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho,
in a whaling shop with Captain Smith,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho.
At first I was not black, but green,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho,
learning the ropes and the routine,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho.
We rendered two leviathans
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho,
to four hundred barrels of midnight sun,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho.
My pay was eighty pounds: one man.
Sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho.
Eighty pounds: one African.
Sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho.
I remembered the first time I went to sea,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho,
crammed skin to skin with misery,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho.
On nights when I drew graveyard watch,
sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho,
sometimes I gave in to heartache.
Sing hi-ho, laddies, hi-ho.
Allen Butler Talcott, River Island, c. 1900
Sailing to Saybrook (c. 1766)
by Marilyn Nelson
I wonder if anyone owns that little island.
It would cost only a few hours of work
to convert those trees to firewood to sell in Saybrook,
in the alchemy of silver out of sweat.
But everything has either a price or an owner,
here where dark people are commodities
to speculate on or convert to cash.
How do you buy an island? Who do you pay?
Could I hop ashore, raise a scrap of cloth as a flag,
and claim a free land, in the name of Meg?
Edward C. Volkert, In the Shade
Contemplating Time c. (1770)
by Marilyn Nelson
Circling and circling the lazy meadow glare
the red-tail sees exactly the right chance,
and life feeds life. Good afternoon, ladies,
how do you do? With your permission. Look:
just up there, on that sunny vacant spot
a Pequot village died out, of the pox.
There must be more than sixty unmarked graves
up toward the tree line. Dug a few myself.
Surely they must have thought God died. Like me,
when I was pushed on board, my life to feed
the coffers of a stranger. Yet things fall
together again. The truth is, the earth heals
over our fates as over a taken squirrel’s.
Mayhap we are not the center. Mayhap you
young ladies are Creation’s best success,
chewing the cud and contemplating time
with blank-eyed innocence. Just visited
a man I shall buy and set to work for me.
I can make up my investment in six months,
even if I give him forty percent.
I’ll hire him out at haying first. Good day.
Let’s see: If I can talk his master down…
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