Hannah & Her Mother


The existence of Hannah is solely tied to an oral history recorded by Bashford Dean when the Dyckman Farmhouse was purchased and turned into a museum. As follows:

“During the first half of the nineteenth century this addition was occupied by the cook, black Hannah, who had been born on the place as the daughter of a slave who was partly of Indian blood. Tradition describes her with bright-colored headgear, face as black as ebony, temper decidedly irregular, and a strong leaning toward a corncob pipe. Her kitchen with its white floor strewn with sand in patterns did not open into the house itself but on a porch from which one had access to the winter kitchen.”

No documents past the 1820 census listing a free woman in the household have, as yet, been discovered to prove Hannah’s existence and some tantalizing comments in the description open up further avenues of inquiry. Most notably is the description of the “floor strewn with sand in patterns.” Sand was regularly used as a scrubbing agent for floors in these kitchens, however research and consultation with other historians focusing on enslaved or early Free Black and indigenous cooks has not yielded any cultural propensity to arrange that sand in a pattern.

“Indian” in the context of this description has traditionally been taken to mean indigenous or native. The Dyckman Farmhouse is built directly on Weequasek (part of Wappinger Confederacy) planting grounds and Europeans, Indigenous people and enslaved Africans interacted with one another regularly. 

On the other hand, arranging colored sand in a pattern on a kitchen floor or just outside the threshold is a common practice in parts of India. Albeit small in number, East Indians were brought to early America and the Caribbean as part of the Atlantic trade–is it possible that Hannah’s mother was among them? Admittedly, East Indians were often referred to precisely as such in the period.

Or, could the sand patterning be part of a conjure ritual? Because of their ingredient knowledge, Black cooks often were tasked with making medicinal decoctions, operating as root workers do in traditional West African communities.

Lastly the oral history says that Hannah was the “daughter of a slave who was partly of Indian blood”. The assumption is that Hannah’s enslaved parent was her mother since ownership within the chattel slavery system was based on maternal ownership by the enslaver. However, in the absence of a specific statement that it was her mother who was “of Indian Blood” we cannot assume it was so.