Finding Her
“Northerners know nothing at all about Slavery. They think it is perpetual bondage only. They have no conception of the depth of degradation involved in that word, SLAVERY; if they had, they would never cease their efforts until so horrible a system was overthrown.” - Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Like everyone else that sordid summer, I watched a Black man pleading for the breath of life, his murder streaming on video repetitively, ubiquitously, so we couldn’t help but look.
As I witnessed his suffering, something awful climbed into the pit of my stomach and settled in, reminding me of what we’ve been told countless times before. By Breonna. Ahmaud. Trayvon. None of their deaths were less tragic, but we could not be indifferent to this one.
My soul felt sick. Yet I could not imagine nor pretend to know what it’s like and always has been for Black people in this country.
That miserable feeling in my gut felt familiar. I got it every time I went looking for her, a woman forgotten and never known in the annals of history nor in our family—the reason my DNA is 1.6% Nigerian.
Ever since this genetic discovery several years ago, I have longed to make her “known.” To recognize her amidst the many thousands of Africans and brown-skinned people brought here as enslaved people or born into slavery, whose names and lives we will never know. On my quest to find her, I scoured page after godforsaken page of slave registers and wills and probates from the 1800s, searching for information until I just had to STOP. So profoundly crushing it was and anathema to everything we know ourselves to be as compassionate human beings, to read record after record of “Negro” men, women, and children sold from $20 to $1,000, and then enslaved to the next family member for that person’s natural life.
Although I had been educated about these things, immersing myself in the documents of that era offered a whole different way of knowing what it was like. I also found myself in a slave owner’s shoes, wishing to God they didn’t fit.
Then one day I found what I was looking for. In curly script dated January 11th, 1838, was written, “Account of sales of the Negroes,” followed by the names of three human beings. Next to each name was a dollar value. Celia. Her name rose from the page, connecting me to her across the generations such that I experienced relief and burden all at once. Relieved that my intense research and genealogical sleuthing had finally paid off and I was able to solve the mystery that sent me on this journey. The burden, however, hung heavily around my heart. Here was evidence that my third great-grandmother was a slave, sold for $265.00 upon the death of the white man who owned her. At first, all l I could do was sit with that feeling and the reality of what my “dominant” race had done to her.
“I once saw a young slave girl dying soon after the birth of a child nearly white. In her agony, she cried out, ‘Oh Lord, come and take me!’ Her mistress stood by and mocked at her like an incarnate fiend. ‘You suffer, do you?’ she exclaimed. ‘I am glad of it. You deserve it all, and more, too.’”
Many times during this genealogical undertaking, while poring over so many documents, my imagination grew exhausted by the perceived futility of a person’s life. I surmised that enduring such abuse would cause a complete lack of hope, autonomy, inspiration and motivation. Something akin to depression would creep into my head and body—a heavy feeling I knew well that pulled me into bed, made me feel like giving up on life. Even writing this, the heaviness returned and my throat tightened, a visceral response to my imagining.
