Mercy… On Buried Ground

Destiny Crockett

This collage triptych is based upon four enslaved children who lived and died in Philadelphia between 1734-1744. They premiered in an exhibition titled Groundings at the Christ Church Neighborhood House in 2024. The children’s names are in the burial books in the church’s archive, but the exact dates and years of their births could not be located.

These clothes are not the kind of clothes they would have worn. The clothes are modeled after what the artist saw in a photo taken between 1890-1910 in Detroit, of free Black children. They also wouldn’t have worn these colors. The artist wanted to put the care into outfitting them that she didn’t think they were given in the archive, as it goes.

One child was listed simply as the child owned by the people of the Stranger Grounds. The artist named the silhouette in their honor Mercy, after the title of Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel.