Review of Debra Bruno's 'A Hudson Valley Reckoning'

Beautiful, bucolic images of the Hudson Valley and the Catskills have drawn people to this region for centuries. As painted by the likes of Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, these pictures, with their soaring mountains, cascading waterfalls, and gold-tinted sunsets, captured the essential goodness of America—a republic blessed and protected by powers unseen, only hinted at in the landscape's sheer grandeur.

But these images were always misleading, incomplete—not only because they ignored the industrial spoliation already underway, and not only because they erased the indigenous peoples who had called the place home for millennia. As Debra Bruno notes in an absorbing and rigorously researched new book, such images also obscured another unpleasant reality: the enslaved Black people who had worked the land and built the wealth of the area's early settler families—including, to her surprise and chagrin, the author's own.

Appalled, Bruno sets out to learn everything she can about this "dismal" side of Hudson Valley history—and the myths and lies that have been used to cover it up. Earlier studies suggested that the region's slaves "were seldom ill-treated," among other self-comforting pap. To this "kinder, gentler storyline," Bruno offers a much-needed corrective. Like the "treacherous currents of the Hudson," Bruno finds that with history there's "the placid surface and an altogether different situation underneath."

By the mid-1600s, when the region was still part of Dutch-run New Netherland, imports from Africa began replacing captive Native Americans and indentured Europeans as the go-to source for forced labor. Slavery spread rapidly. In some areas, enslaved Africans made up as much as 28 percent of the population.

The book focuses on Bruno's hometown of Athens and other towns south of Albany on the west side of the Hudson—Catskill, Coxsackie, New Baltimore. It's full of astonishing tales of suffering and resistance. During the Revolution, one family's servants stuffed every gun in the house with ash, intentionally leaving the family unprotected when British-aligned Native Americans came bursting through the door. Bruno also relates a devastating story from the 1890s about an elderly Black woman named Emily, whose children had long ago been sold away from her. As she aged, Emily crafted a homemade doll collection as a stand-in for her children. The collection drew kids in the New Baltimore area. "Did the little girls who played with the dolls realize what those dolls represented?" Bruno wonders. "What were their names, those dolls and those lost children?"

Bruno can't answer those questions, of course. Yet she works unstintingly to track down the names of others whose lives and stories would otherwise have been lost. Early in her search she meets Eleanor C. Mire, and she is startled to discover Mire descends from people whom her own ancestors enslaved. Bruno uses newspapers, diaries, public records, and every other conceivable resource to enliven her rich and disturbing portrait of life in the early Hudson Valley. She confesses to having spent as much time "poking around old cemeteries" as in libraries and archives, but such a freewheeling approach gives the book a visceral and deeply personal feel. Bruno describes a sense of having been "called" to the work of peering into the dismal underside of her family's history—and her nation's—and haunted by the ghosts of the forgotten past.

A Hudson Valley Reckoning closes with a steely consideration of how centuries' worth of wrongs might begin to be made right: simply put, by starting close to home. "Repair is coming," she confidently writes, noting progress in how the story is finally being addressed by new signage and programming at local museums from Westchester's Philipsburg Manor to Albany's Philip Schuyler Mansion. A descendant of area Huguenots, she joins the advisory board of the Ulster County Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an official public body whose website offers a trove of research, including a map of every location in the area tied to slavery in some way. "I had this sense of people carefully placing tiny puzzle pieces into a vast landscape," Bruno writes. "When it's done, the picture will be vast and maybe even mind-blowing."