PORTSMOUTH — When Akeia de Barros Gomes thinks about the country’s 250th anniversary, she thinks about Johnny Rockets.

Her son was 5 or 6 when she suggested they stop at the retro restaurant for a hamburger and milkshake. She described it as a 1950s-style diner, expecting him to picture the cheerful version of the decade: jukeboxes, poodle skirts and shiny chrome.

He said he was not hungry. Later, when she suggested the restaurant again, he said he would rather have a sandwich at home.

That night, he finally told her why.

“Because I didn’t want to sit in the Black section, and I didn’t want to not be able to use the restroom,” he said.

Her son had not yet acquired the nostalgia that allows people to remember the decade as an endless sock hop. He had heard his mother, an archaeologist and historian, talk about segregation. When she said “1950s,” he heard something different.

“It really made me think about nostalgia and how nostalgia can be harmful to history,” Gomes said.

Gomes, director of the Edward W. Kane and Monica J. Wallace Center for Black History in Newport, told that story Sunday during the first of two Portsmouth talks examining the promise, hypocrisy and unfinished business of the American Revolution.

She spoke first at the Portsmouth Historical Society as part of the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter’s “American Revolution Experience” traveling exhibit. About an hour later, she addressed a commemoration of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment at Patriots Park. (This article distills both lectures.)

Together, the talks posed a difficult question as the country marks its 250th birthday: How should Americans celebrate a revolution fought in the name of liberty when so many people were excluded from that liberty?

Gomes calls it “the 250th paradox.”

“I often wonder how Black and Indigenous people are supposed to feel about the 250th,” she said at Patriots Park. “In all of its complexity, in some of its hypocrisy, in a lot of its achievements, what should we take from 1776 and the 250th anniversary of this country?”

The other side of nostalgia

Gomes is wary of tidy history. The past, she said, does not sort itself neatly into heroes and villains, slavery and freedom, triumph and failure.

During the Revolution, colonists fought the British for freedom while slavery, the Middle Passage, forced assimilation and violence against Indigenous people continued. Abolitionists occupied the same world as enslavers, and sometimes the contradictions existed within the same person.

The Declaration of Independence called Indigenous people “merciless Indian Savages.” An early draft, meanwhile, included Thomas Jefferson’s condemnation of King George III for perpetuating the slave trade — language that was removed before the document was adopted.

“How do we still acknowledge this momentous moment in history alongside that reality?” Gomes asked.

Rather than using nostalgia as a balm, she favors what she called “reflective nostalgia”: asking why people choose to remember an era in a particular way and which parts of the story they would rather leave alone.

Such reflection can be disruptive. That, she suggested, is precisely its value.

Three stories

Gomes illustrated the paradox through the lives of three Black Newporters: Caesar Babcock, who served in the 1st Rhode Island Regiment; Jemima Bull, who escaped enslavement with her children by siding with the British; and Cardardo, an enslaved man whose supposed freedom came with conditions attached.

Their stories demonstrate why Gomes prefers the term “freedom making” to “freedom.”

Freedom sounds like an object one possesses or a destination one reaches, she said. Freedom making describes the continuing work of moving toward liberation, even when those doing the work may never enjoy its full benefits.

Babcock was made to serve in place of his enslaver, Hezekiah Babcock. Caesar reportedly served for 16 months, including with the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, but Hezekiah received the pay for that service.

After pensions became available to Revolutionary War veterans, Caesar applied. His case was supported by another soldier, Hezekiah Babcock’s widow and Babcock’s children. But Caesar’s commanding officers had died, and he lacked the paper trail officials demanded.

His application was denied twice.

“As far as we know, Caesar died without receiving his pension and payment for his service,” Gomes said. “This is the story of a lot of Black and Indigenous soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War.”

His story complicates the usual image of the Black Revolutionary soldier who enlisted and thereby earned his liberty. Caesar did not freely choose to serve, was not paid for serving and was later denied the benefits extended to other veterans.

“How do we contextualize Caesar’s service?” Gomes asked at Patriots Park. “How do we talk about the freedom that he fought for that he was never able to fully realize?”

There is no uncomplicated answer.

Jemima Bull found another route toward freedom. She was 26 and the mother of three children when she escaped her enslaver and reached British-held New York. From there she went to Nova Scotia.

Her name appears in the “Book of Negroes,” the British ledger documenting Black Loyalists evacuated from New York at the end of the war. The record describes her as a “slender wench.”

For Jemima, Gomes said, loyalty to Britain was not necessarily a political conviction. It was a means of freeing herself and her children from slavery — and, Gomes believes, from sexual abuse.

Her experience raises another question: In a war commonly described as a contest between American liberty and British oppression, where does one place an enslaved woman who sought liberty from the British?

“How do we tell her story and her concept of freedom?” Gomes asked.

Free, with conditions

Cardardo lived in the Newport house that is now home to the Center for Black History. He was enslaved by John Wanton, a Quaker at a time when the Society of Friends was pressuring members to relinquish human bondage.

Wanton manumitted Cardardo in 1775 but declared that Cardardo drank excessively and could not care for himself. Wanton therefore reserved the right to remain his legal guardian.

The document can be read as an act of concern. It can also be read as a means of retaining control — and unpaid labor — while technically complying with Quaker demands.

“You can’t help but wonder if this was the enslaver’s way of maintaining free labor,” Gomes said.

Cardardo later enlisted in the Revolution, perhaps as his only practical means of leaving Wanton’s household. Yet a man of color was recorded in Wanton’s home in the 1782 census. Gomes cannot say whether that man was Cardardo, but formerly enslaved people often remained with or returned to their enslavers because independence brought few economic alternatives.

“In reality, freedom meant poverty,” she said.

Cardardo’s story also challenges what Gomes called the false binary between slavery and freedom. Manumission did not necessarily bring safety, property, political rights or the ability to support a family.

“The true opposite of slavery,” she said, “was belonging.”

Fighting for a distant promise

At Patriots Park, Gomes turned from the injustices suffered by Black and Indigenous soldiers to the extraordinary faith embodied by their service.

They understood the contradiction, she said. They heard the Revolution’s language of liberty and equality while knowing it did not yet apply to them. They could fight for the country and return home unable to vote, own property in some places or move freely through society.

Still, they fought.

“Recognizing the promise in those words, even though you might not see them within your own lifetime, and fighting based on those principles, was their way of freedom making,” Gomes said.

The willingness to sacrifice for a promise one may never personally receive, she said, deserves particular honor.

“I can think of no bigger sacrifice than fighting for something that you don’t get yourself,” Gomes said.

For Gomes, the 250th anniversary can be both celebration and interrogation: a recognition of what happened in 1776 and an examination of who benefited, who paid and who kept struggling to make the words real.

“Freedom is a constant process and requires constant work,” she said. “Even if we never actually get to utopia, there’s a lot to be learned and a lot that’s achieved in that movement.”