Photo of Julia
Tomi
Julia Dyd Havens Johnson sits alone. The hunch in her shoulders betrays her age—likely in her late 70s by the assumed date of the photo’s creation—and how much she has aged since her first days at the Manor in the 1830s. Her aproned uniform, however, suggests that her work has not yet finished. Over six decades, she has provided her housekeeping services to Sylvester Manor. And, it is on the Manor's grounds where, in 1906, she will be laid to eternal rest.
Other photos of Julia might exist, but this image, housed under the box and folder titled "Sylvester Manor and grounds, unknown people, 'Mrs. Lamb' [Historic Structure Report]: undated," is the only visual evidence of Julia found in the Sylvester Manor Archive Collection. This fact alone reveals much about the history of race, gender, and labor at Sylvester Manor. Julia, as noted in the prior entries to this essay, exercised a pronounced impact on those of the Manor. She owned and sold plots of inherited land on Shelter Island to the Horsford family. She was even distantly related to the Horsfords as her father was, more likely than not, someone from the Havens family. With all that said, Julia, like many Black folks throughout history, was still considered a marginal figure to history. Unlike, say, Cornelia Horsford, Julia did not warrant extensive photographing. Society at the time could not envision a Black working-class woman as a person of status and, thereby, a worthy subject of photographic attention. Initially fitted into the category of "unknown people" (a misleading categorization, subject to change in response to Sylvester Manor’s evolving understanding of its history), Julia's lucky to have been photographed at all.
These aspects are notwithstanding the staging of the photo itself. Again, it’s hard not to compare. Whether a tintype as a grinning child or a lateral photo of her solemnly doing needlework, Cornelia appears in the archive as a woman who might be confined to labor in the domestic sphere but whose personality at least possesses a dignified range. Julia, however, is unidimensional. Shunted outside the Manor’s doors and posed in front of what seems to be the entrance to the cellar of the Manor house, she is reduced to her role as a laboring woman. Her advanced age in this photo signals how those of the Manor saw her: a beloved family member whose value still comes across much too narrowly and whose recognition only comes much too late.