My Friends at Brook Farm | Page 2

of the nineteenth century, evidences of Dutch ancestry were still to be noticed among the people of the "Old Colonie."
My father's house, where I was born, stood on the south side of Beaver street next to that of the Ostranders where the last Walloon Civil Chief was said to have lived. As a child I heard Dutch spoken in the street, in the stores and the market. We spoke Dutch, more or less, at home, and no other language at my grandfather's farm. The Sears family came from Cape Cod, but my mother was a Van Der Zee, and although the first Van Der Zee came from Holland in 1642, the family was as Dutch as ever in 1842, two centuries later. Mother learned English, at school but spoke it very little until after her marriage, and then crooned nursery rhymes in Dutch to her children; "Trip a trop a tronches," "Wat zegt Mynhur Papa," etc.
My father's store was "on the Pier," which is equivalent to saying he was a flour merchant. The Pier was a sort of bulkhead between the canal basin and the river, and it was occupied by a single row of buildings, all of which were flour stores. The Genesee Valley was a famous wheat growing country in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the grain was ground in Rochester and shipped down the Erie Canal to Albany, the receiving and distributing center for the trade. My father made business trips to New York, and, sometimes, as far east as Boston, in those days a long journey. He usually arranged to go "down the river" in the Spring, having, beside his own affairs, commissions to fill as delegate to one or more of the May Conventions.
The May Conventions were annual gatherings of religious bodies, philanthropic organizations, reform associations, literary associations, educational associations and all sorts of associations for the improvement of the human race in general and the American people in particular. The Friends yearly Meeting, the Conference of the American Anti-Slavery societies, the Grahamites or Vegetarians, the Temperance advocates and other upholders of beneficent, benevolent, and Utopian ideals assembled on these occasions, and with much eloquence, made it clear to the meanest understanding that the universal adoption of the principles especially professed by each would do away with all evil in the world and bring about a return of the Golden Age.
My mother did not always attend the May Conventions, but whenever she went, she took one of us children with her. My first visit to New York was made as an unqualified member of the Albany delegation to something or other, I forget what. One thing I do not forget, however, and that is hearing Horace Greeley make an address, and afterward being puffed up with pride when the orator chatted familiarly with his small admirer at dinner in our hotel on Barclay Street.
When my mother was absent from home, the family was left in charge of our courtesy Aunt Catholina Van Olinda who kept the house with my elder sister Althea, while I was dispatched for the time to my grandfather's farm. I was very much at home on the farm and spent many happy days there in early childhood, being regarded as a sort of heir apparent by the principal personages there, namely, my grandfather, John Van Der Zee the elder, and Tone and Cleo. The last named, Antony and Cleopatra, to speak properly, were ancient negroes born and brought up on the farm and rarely leaving it in all their long lives. They were slaves, inasmuch as they disdained to be emancipated, and "free niggers" they looked down on with contempt. They belonged to the Van Der Zee place and the place belonged to them, and not to belong to anybody or to any place was, to their apprehension, very like being a houseless and homeless pauper. As I was John Van Zee the younger, according to their genealogy the natural successor of Baas Hans, they extended to me assurances of their most distinguished consideration. My father, Charles Sears, was not in the line of succession, he being English or in other words a foreigner. They tolerated him, partly because he spoke to them in Dutch, the only language they knew or cared anything about, and partly because he was, after all, a member of the family by marriage. As he always brought a book in hand when visiting the farm, they made sure he was a drukker--that is, a printer or bookseller or something of that vain and frivolous description. Cleo attained great age, overrunning the century mark. In her later years she came by inheritance to my mother, and so rather curiously, it happened that while my father openly professed anti-slavery sentiments, my mother was a slaveholder,