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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2017
Andrew Mellick's The Story of an Old Farm is a thoroughly researched book that tells us a great deal about how enslaved blacks resisted against and survived their oppression in eighteenth-century central New Jersey. And yet it fails to mention or discuss a rather sensational incident of slave resistance in the area that had great implications for Yombo's life in bondage. Reverend John Bodine Thompson made this intriguing remark in his 1894 address commemorating the 175th anniversary of the Reformed Dutch Church of Readington Township, Hunterdon County:
Those [slaves] who came [to New Jersey] from the coast of Guinea [i.e., southern West Africa] were regarded as the most valuable because of their superior endowments, both mental and physical. “Guinea Negroes” brought more on the open market. Among these were a man who had been the chief of his tribe, with his wife, who now shared his slavery as she shared his rule in the land of their fathers. These became the property of Jacob Kline. … [Slavery] is bitter at the best, and it is no wonder that these Africans were fearfully homesick. Every endeavor was made to cheer and comfort them— save, of course, that of setting them free, which, probably, was never thought of. The result was, that when all hope was gone, they sought and found together the only freedom possible for them. The spot is still pointed out, on Kline's brook, a mile directly north of this place, where stood the cedar tree upon which, one morning, the master found only the lifeless bodies of those who refused to remain as slaves in a strange land.
Thompson's speech, focusing on the Hunterdon church's “members of African descent,” was printed a week later in a local newspaper and is important because it provides a rare glimpse of native West Africans who lived and died under bondage in New Jersey. At the same time, the minister left several critical questions unanswered: What was the ethnicity of this presumably noble West African couple? Where exactly in “Guinea” did they rule? What factors led to their enslavement? How were they able to survive their wrenching voyage to the New World, and when did they arrive in New Jersey? And finally, why did they choose to take their own lives in such a horrific manner?
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