SO MANY CHICKENS BECOME DUCKS

“The committee of Ulster county…… ordered that Johannis Osterhout, jr. be paid 13.2 pounds for going to the Indian towns. A payment made to Nicolas, the Indian, for a like service.…A charge was made for “a pint of rum for the Indian.”- July 2, 1777

    Recently I drove over to Lenox, Mass. to locate the old Osterhout homestead and dig a little deeper into the African American Osterhout branch that connected James VanDerZee to my lineage. In the little historical society, housed in the Lenox Academy building, I found the best evidence to date of the New York slavery connection to the Lenox Osterhouts. I’m sorry to say that name attachment through slavery still seems the most plausible explanation for the existence of black Osterhouts in this predominantly white Dutch tree. I don’t know how we are going to remedy this through reparations. Happy to give what I can. 

    What I found in Lenox was a three page list compiled by the late Mrs. C. S. Gunn, a black woman from Great Barrington, Mass. All the names on the faint, faded pages (listed in pencil) are of people of color, who got married at the Reformed Church of Coxsackie, New York. Near the bottom of one page, with a circle drawn around it is: 5-31-1822- Quash (Osterhout*) and Caty (Brown) (free)= David born aug [illegible]. Was Quash the son of a Dutch white master and a slave, or a freed slave given the last name in manumission? I don’t know. Was his son the David Osterhout who married Josephine Brister Egberts? I think so. In the end D.N.A., marriage, and child birth are inconsequential to this narrative. The connection to this branch may, or may not, be through slavery or blood. In the long run, these black Osterhouts, may not have (or ever will) looked upon white Osterhouts as kin or even kind masters and mistresses. They may have despised us all…and with good reason. I’m probably the only one who considers this family—love or hate me for it.   

   Late that afternoon in Lenox I knocked on the door of an old, unpainted clapboard, two story farmhouse on Hubbard St., thinking it looked a lot like the Osterhout homestead I’d seen in James VanDerZee’s photos. I peered through the dirty storm door as a white man, deep in the shadows, hung up the phone and walked towards me. This was 85 year old Bob Vincent, who within a matter of minutes told me that he had grown up in that house, knew the Osterhouts well and was happy to talk. Pointing to the well preserved Osterhout house across the highway, he rattled off stories of working for, and playing pool with, the Osterhouts. He had fond memories of Halloweens as a kid when the spinster Osterhout sisters would give him piles of candy, and always treated him kindly. One night he helped one of the Osterhout woman (he couldn’t remember which) off the kitchen floor after she had taken a bad spill, and couldn’t get to her feet. Bob Vincent got her to the hospital. 

       When the highway came through in the 1950’s, as a young man, Mr. Vincent helped his grandfather a prominent local land owner, tear down the old Egbert and VanDerZee houses that buttressed the Osterhout home. He played pool in the Osterhout barn with a nephew only known as “Cueball” Butler. Cueball had been raised by the Osterhout sisters and was also remembered fondly by the woman who helped me in the historical society as part of the Osterhout family. She told me Cueball had moved away, had a hard life and died years ago, sometime after the Korean War.  

    Bob Vincent was friendly and also a genealogy buff, ready to chat me up on my (as well as his own) Irish lineage. The one thing that has become crystal clear writing this book is how little people are interested in anyone’s (other than their own) family history. We all seem to to wired that way. I’m no different. I had absolutely no interest in Bob Vincent’s Irish or English kin coming over on the Speedwell out of  Delfshaven or meeting up with the Mayflower…. I glazed over while Bob Vincent ticked off his royal Irish bloodline….checking my watch. Bob seemed to know (and remember) everything about his ancestors, going back hundreds of years, like he’d been there for each birth and battle. He was just waiting for me to knock on the door and ask. I was so wrapped up in my own shit, I couldn’t really appreciate his own wild alien ride. I’d sure knocked on the right door. 

    Within an hour Mr. Vincent was seated in the passenger seat of my car, talking nonstop, as we tooled around America’s former playground of the ultra-rich; searching cemeteries for the Osterhout name. The Church on the Hill  was the first stop. I know Josephine and David Osterhout are buried there, with the girls, but we couldn’t find them. I’m not much for gravestone searching....and it was getting cold. The one black man in town was the elderly, blind groundskeeper for the cemetery. Bob knocked on his door to see if he wanted to meet me. I waited in the car. The old guy was tired and politely begged off meeting a white Osterhout. He’d been blind all his life. White Osterhout? Black Osterhout? eh. He'd pass. 

     After the Osterhouts, VanDerZees and Egberts died off or moved away, the tiny black service community of Lenox, Mass. essentially dried up and disappeared. Now it’s elite white institutions like Tanglewood and Shakespeare & Company, alongside a few stalwart holdouts like Bob Vincent and the tired groundskeeper. It’s not the Gilded Age, but it is all white and all privileged. I asked Bob Vincent if he had ever met a white Osterhout? He just smiled and shook his head no.