A church connected to Lucy and Lois, documented as the final two enslaved people sold in New Haven in 1825, recently held a “Service of Lamentation and Healing” to honor their stories of heartbreak and resilience.
“Lucy and Lois Tritton were members of this congregation through their owners, Tritton,” said Rev. Luk De Volder, rector at Trinity on the Green, an Episocopal church in New Haven, which hosted the service.
“It is very important to come together with everyone,” De Volder said. “Still, racism is having an impact that it shouldn’t.”
Black and white, the congregation listened, cried and ad-libbed to a choir whose voices lifted up in prayer and deep emotion. A woman in a pew wore a brown jacket with Africa written on it – a thrift shop find, she said.
It was right across the street from Trinity on the Green that 200 years ago Lucy and Lois were sold to a man named Anthony P. Sanford, a fellow church member.
Two centuries later, the mood at the church was a mix of deep sadness at what was done to mother and daughter here, and a gentle hope for reconciliation.
“It doesn't take away what happened,” said the Rev. Rowena Kemp, rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Hartford. “But it acknowledges and affirms that it did, in fact, happen, and so it allows us to move forward.”
But healing can be complicated.
“Nothing about slavery or any of this process is healing to me,” said Erica Bradley, who was Black. “I’m here to learn.”
The service included a litany by Yolanda Pierce for those not yet ready, read by Valarie Stanley and Geri Mauhs, members of the event’s organizing committee: “Let us not rush to the language of healing, before understanding the fullness of the injury and the depth of the wound.”
A world of pain
Slavery has deep roots in Connecticut going back centuries.
Enslaved Africans first arrived in New Haven Colony upon its founding in 1638. The colony’s first governor, Theophilus Eaton, brought slaves with him to the New World, according to the New Haven Museum.
Lucy’s journey began in the mid-1700s when she and her parents were stolen from Africa, possibly Ghana, and brought to St. Thomas in the Caribbean, a Danish slave depot.
Lucy and her father were sold to an Englishman she called General Tritton. In reality, Tritton was not a general, but a merchant ship captain. The fate of Lucy’s mother is not known.
Lucy was then taken to the Tritton family home in London, and eventually moved to Nova Scotia, where her enslavers immigrated.
Tritton also had a second home in New Haven that the family frequented. And that was how Lucy — and her daughter, Lois, who was born into slavery in 1799 — ended up in New Haven.
Jill Marie Snyder is a historian who helped put together the 200-year remembrance service. She’s researched the lives of Lucy and Lois, and continues to research other African Americans who lived in New Haven in the 1800s.
“How that economic framework, how people suffered within it, being moved around, separated, sold, resold, and it’s the pain that it creates for a whole Atlantic world of Black people,” she said.
‘An emotional journey’
Denise Manning Paige is part of this “whole Atlantic world of Black people” in pain. Though a longtime resident of New Haven, she said she just learned the history of her family – the Mannings – through the Yale & Slavery Research Project.
That’s because there were gaps in her family history since her mother had been orphaned in the late 1920s at the age of seven. The family knew that their grandfather, who was Black, had studied art at Yale.
But she also found that her mother “had two uncles who had graduated from Yale in 1880 and 1881,” Manning Paige said. “And so absorbing all of that in the context of all of this makes it just, it’s a very emotional journey.”
Captain Tritton drowned at sea in 1790 when his ship went down in a storm. After that, his widow Sara Tritton, who was in need of money, took out a loan from a man named Jacocks. She offered him Lucy and Lois as collateral.
Jacocks sold the loan to a man named John Nicoll, and when Sara was unable to repay the loan, the sherriff of New Haven arranged an auction to sell Lucy and Lois in 1825 for repayment.
Decades earlier, Connecticut had passed laws aimed at gradually emancipating enslaved people.
One law banned the import of slaves. (Tritton had brought in the women from Canada.) The state also passed the Gradual Emancipation Act in 1784. That law did not immediately abolish slavery in the state, but said children born to enslaved mothers should be freed after 21 or 25 years.
The laws meant the auction should not have happened at all, Snyder said.
The women were marched through the streets of New Haven led by a drummer shouting ”Slaves for sale!” — before being sold for $10 each to Sanford, who is referred to as an abolitionist in some historical documents.
Snyder said Sanford actually kept Lois in bondage for years until she earned $600 to buy her freedom. It’s likely Sanford viewed Lois as an indentured servant working to pay back Sara’s loan. Like Lois, many Africans were moved from slavery to indenture, Snyder found in the course of her research.
Lucy by then was too old to work from sun-up to sun-down. She was allowed to go free by Sanford and set up shop as a laundress at the edge of town, a common occupation for African American women.
Lois eventually worked alongside her mother as a laundress, married a man named Asa Jeffrey, and had a son, Henry, who was a barber.
‘A zeal for righteousness’
The congregation at Trinity on the Green was invited to receive healing at a side altar, with prayers and the anointing of oil on the forehead or hand. They were also offered the opportunity to light candles at the columbarium in remembrance of Lucy and Lois, and a line began to form.
Among them was Jude Fitzmaurice, 13 and white, who wanted to light candles for Lucy and Lois, and for all “people who were enslaved, who had to go through that trauma.”
Two hundred years ago, this columbarium is where Lucy and Lois would sit – confined in a cramped, boxed space in the back of the church. Even after they were freed, Black church members were segregated.
Today, a tradition called Kurova Guva exists among the Shona people in Africa to bring the spirits of ancestors back to their family and the community. And so in rhythm with the mesmerizing drumming of an udu, the Rev. Cecil Tengatenga chanted to honor Lucy and Lois’ journey and resilience, highlighting their connection to the African diaspora.
“Come, Mother Lucy, your nameless name, ancestor. Come Sister Lois, your nameless name, ancestor. Come, give us your protection,” chanted Tengatenga, framed by a magnificent stained glass window with Christ on the cross as his background, lit by the rays of a gentle evening sun.
The spirits of Lucy and Lois lingered on in the church long after the service had ended – they had been invited here to bless this congregation, and to bless all people.
Beyond the church doors lay downtown New Haven — a city bustling, hustling, and striving toward racial justice.
As people began to stream out, they carried with them a call to action, having recited a chant inside the church just that evening:
God, in your mercy, / Show my own complicity in injustice. / Convict me for my indifference. / Forgive me when I have remained silent. / Equip me with a zeal for righteousness. / Never let me grow accustomed or acclimated to unrighteousness.
