The Sketch Book of Nick DeLuca

Like many Americans I was devastated by 2024 presidential election results: Donald Trump as chosen as 47th President of the United States.^[1] And like many Americans I turned to the internet for guidance, reprieve, and distractions: How do I update my passport? Am I eligible for Canadian citizenship? What are the best countries for American expats? A headline from the New York Times seemed to capture my disillusionment: “Resist or Retreat? Democratic Voters Are Torn About Whether to Keep Fighting.”

I meditated for a while on this idea of fleeing the country. It remains a strong impulse for me. After all, multiple former advisors have described Trump as a fascist. Trump claimed he’ll be a dictator on day one of his second term. He vowed to dismantle the civil service. He promised to obliterate the independence of federal agencies like the Department of Justice. He wants to bypass the Senate’s function of advising and consenting on presidential appointees. He said he’ll deport immigrants by the millions. He won’t be held accountable for breaking the law, not for stealing confidential documents from the American people and not for inciting a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. And Trump is constructing a cabinet and government apparatus full of loyalists who will execute his goals and promises.^[2]

American democracy is in grave peril. ‘Devastated’ feels too light a word to describe the gravity of this moment.

My thoughts then settled on the Freedom Trail tours I lead as a ranger for the National Parks of Boston. At one particular stop on my tour, I observe that each generation has had to fight for their rights and freedoms from the earliest colonial days to the present.

The stop is on the Rose Kennedy Greenway at the corner of Hanover Street and Atlantic Avenue. This site was once part of the shoreline that circled the north cove of the Shawmut Peninsula. About a decade after the English established the Town of Boston in 1630, Bostonians redeveloped the cove into a functional mill pond.^[3]

The mill pond neighborhood had grist and lumber mills, ropewalks, copperworks, shipyards, distilleries, butchers, tanners, fishmongers, wharfingers, and at least one chocolate factory. It was stinky and disgusting but it was accessible to people with less resources than the colonial white elite.^[4] It was here that Zipporah Potter Atkins made her home.

Zipporah is the first recorded woman of color to own property in Boston. She purchased a small plot and dwelling home by the mill pond in 1670.^[5]

Zipporah lived in a unique social position. Born likey in the 1640s, Zipporah is one of only ten people identified in the historical record who was conceived by enslaved parents but born a free person.^[6] As such, Zipporah had a foot both in the enslaved community of Boston and its free community of color. She worked to earn a living and, with a small inheritance she received from her father, Zipporah was able to carve out a modest life for herself next to the mill pond.^[7] She lived there for almost 30 years.

It wasn’t always a peaceful life for Zipporah. By the 1660s she was working as a domestic servant for the Parker household. In September 1663, Zipporah gave birth to a child out of wedlock.^[8] Eyewitness testimony differs as to whether the baby was stillborn or died shortly after birth. Members of the Parker household accused Zipporah of murdering the child. Boston freeholders apprehended, detained, and subjected Zipporah to an inquest. Though she was never formally charged with breaking any local laws of fornication, authorities had Zipporah jailed regardless.^[9] She had to submit a petition of habeas corpus for her release, which was eventually granted. After all the depositions, testimonies, inquiries, and legal maneuvering, Zipporah’s name was cleared. The Parkers were never charged with any crime but they did receive the cold shoulder from their church congregation. Zipporah likely never went back to work for the Parkers. It was then that she purchased her pond-adjacent home.

As a notable community figure and free woman of color, Zipporah helped foster the surrounding communities of color. The north slope of Beacon Hill, for example, which rose up above the western bank of the mill pond, became a consequential Black community for generations to follow.

People like Revolutionary War veteran George Middleton established their homes on the north slope.^[10] Middleton and fellow community members and veterans like Prince Hall became protectors and advocates for their community. They petitioned the government to end slavery and sued for enslaved peoples’ freedom. They fought for their rights on the battlefield, at Bunker Hill and other places. They established benevolent societies, fraternal associations, learning groups, and spaces for religious worship.

In fact, Prince Hall started his own mason lodge in Massachusetts, the first and oldest predominantly Black Freemason lodge in the country.^[11] Fraternal and political groups like these were popular in Boston. But Prince Hall, who was once spurned by a  local lodge on account of his race, recognized the need for this kind of institution in his own community. The Prince Hall Lodge of Masons, then, bent its energies toward community activism for Black Bostonians. This work had generational effects. In the following years leading up the American Civil War, the Prince Hall Lodge of Masons was an incubator for abolitionism. Many of the Black men who joined the ranks of the Prince Hall Masons were persistent agitators who used both legal and extralegal means to push the antislavery movement both here in Boston and across the country.

The Black abolitionists of Beacon Hill’s north slope, I tell visitors on my Freedom Trail tour as I wrap up this stop, “sprang out of the Prince Hall lodge and declared themselves the inheritors of the American Revolution, because according to them it’s up to each generation to secure those rights and liberties for themselves.”

That is their legacy and as Americans it’s ours, too. Though easily taken away, rights and liberties are not lightly given. Most often, they must be fought for.

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^[1] More Americans voted for someone other than Donald Trump than they did for Trump himself. By the time the vote count is officially complete, Trump will not clear 50% of the popular vote. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5w9w160xdo

^[2] Which include Project 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/trump-project-2025.html

^[3] The mill pond was located, roughly, at today’s Bulfinch Triangle and West End.

^[4] Bostonians passed laws regulating the sanitation of this area as early as 1634.

^[5] This was over a century before American independence! It was decades before the Salem Witch Trials!

^[6] Colonists did not codify into law that a child born to an enslaved woman is also born into slavery until the 1670s. Prior, enslaved women could give birth to free children.

^[7] Zipporah’s father, Richard Done, was enslaved and manumitted by the prominent Boston resident Robert Keayne. When Keayne died he gifted Richard a small sum of money which was then passed on to Zipporah.

^[8] Jonathan Parker is presumed to be the father, as he fled the country just prior to the birth and was a known philanderer.

^[9] In matters of legality around the laws of fornication, it was historically the man who was charged under the law. Because Zipporah was a woman and a free person of color, she was the one authorities held to account — and not a single member of the Parker family. This case was also particularly scandalous because the baby’s body was found buried but at a different location than the one Zipporah testified to. And the baby’s body was found decapitated.

^[10] Completed in 1787, the Middleton house still stands at 5 Pinckney Street on Beacon Hill.

^[11] The Prince Hall Masons are still in operation today!