WILLIAMSBURG — The Diocese of Southern Virginia is holding a worship and burial service to reinter the remains and burial objects of enslaved Africans at Bruton Parish on Nov. 2. This will be the final event in the diocese’s 49-day series, called “The Long Way Home: A Season of Reckoning,” which began on Sept. 14.
In the course of doing commemoration work, the Rev. Jan Brown, founder of Williamsburg-based nonprofit SpiritWorks Foundation Center for the Soul, discovered that the remains of enslaved Africans excavated from the Pettus Plantation and Utopia sites in James City County had spent decades at the Smithsonian Institution, according to a news release from The Episcopal Church. The Utopia site is located within the Kingsmill on the James, a residential community.
“Our diocese has undertaken a spiritual and archival journey co-led with the descendant community itself, including Loretta Burwell, an elder of African descent and an Episcopalian who traces her family back to the Burwells of the Kingsmill Plantation,” the news release said. “This process also uncovered 38 more ancestors whose remains are part of the Smithsonian collection and whose names are recorded … through pew assignments, church boxes, registries and vestry books.
The service is scheduled for 10 a.m., with Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe; the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, former presiding bishop; and Bishop Susan Haynes of Southern Virginia expected to attend.
The reinterment will take place at the Utopia site at Kingsmill, where the burial items and remains of three renamed individuals will be reinterred. According to The Episcopal Church, these people were part of one of the earliest communities of enslaved Africans in colonial Virginia.
“This is not a single service or a single Sunday,” Brown said in the release. “These ancestors have waited a long time to come home. The least we can do is take the time to receive them well.”
