Page 50 of The Inquirer

Maybe it was stupid, but I needed that moment. I needed to know that I could, when my film was done, point to a specific time and place where I’d made a conscious decision to put my own family’s reputation on the line. To put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.

The first thing I looked at more closely was the post about the sale of a man named Joshua. The fact that it’d been in with my family’s things in the first place was suspicious. The Traylors always claimed that they’d only had free, paid servants and workers, even before the war. They said they’d kept up appearances for fear of reprisal, but that they’d never actually owned a single slave who hadn’t been immediately freed after purchase. What I found on this page might very well prove that to be a lie.

The way the page was laid out made me think that it’d been something written by Joshua’s owner and given to a newspaper to have the ad run. Whoever its intended recipient had been, they must’ve had amazing eyesight because I doubted it would’ve been much clearer back then.

Still, I managed to puzzle out a little information.

As of 1853, Joshua had been a house slave, approximately twenty-eight years of age, and was described as ‘good-mannered and light-skinned.’ The paper also said that he was missing a finger from his left hand but was in otherwise good health.

It was impossible for me to tell if this ad had been placed by my family to sell Joshua, or if it’d been something my family had received after purchasing the man, perhaps with the intent to free him.

1853. Ten years after the wedding picture Les had showed me. Joshua would’ve been close in age to Obadiah, which meant, if my family had been the ones selling him, there was a good chance that he could be one of the slaves in the background of the wedding picture. I hadn’t brought the picture with me, since there was a good chance Les might mention the picture to his parents or grandparents. The last thing I needed was for any of them to know I’d been doing anything more than humoring Les’s interest in family history. My father would most likely suspect anyway, but anything I could do to deflect attention as long as possible was a good thing.

Fortunately, I’d had the sense to take a picture of it with my phone, just in case it ended up being important.

After putting the photo on my laptop, I pulled it up on the screen. This time, instead of focusing on the bride and groom, I looked for darker faces around them. They stood at the fringes, their clothes marking them as the better-dressed house slaves. Since there wasn’t a picture of Joshua on the paper, I didn’t really have much to go on, but there was always a chance I could spot a man with a missing finger.

When I didn’t see anyone resembling that description, I got myself some coffee and then went through the picture again, this time studying every male. The paper had mentioned Joshua being light-skinned. In this type of photo, it wasn’t always easy to tell the different skin tones, especially when there were plenty of white men who tanned dark.

Then I saw it. A hand on the shoulder of a dark-haired girl who looked like she was in her late teens. A hand with three fingers and a thumb. I focused in on the face, confirming a skin tone light enough to tell me that he’d most likely had a white father or grandfather. It was probably why I hadn’t picked him out the first time through. Back then, he would’ve been told that he could ‘pass.’

That was when it hit me. Finding Joshua in this picture in 1843 meant that when he was being sold in 1853, the odds were high that it’d been Obadiah Calvert who’d sold him.

“Fuck.” I leaned back in my chair, almost dazed.

This shouldn’t have been surprising. I’d suspected the lie for a long time, even as a teenager. I wasn’t naïve. Many public schools in the South softened the reality of slavery, and there were plenty of people who tried to brush it off like it hadn’t been a big deal. Anyone whose family lived in the South before the Civil War and who’d had the money, acknowledged that their ancestors had indeed owned slaves.

The most those families would claim in public now would be that their ancestors at least hadn’t been cruel. In private, they might make comments about the ‘necessity’ of slavery. But I’d never heard another family go so far as to say that they’d paid every single one of the people who worked for them.

I’d never been able to understand why someone hadn’t already called my parents out on it. Now, I had a pretty good idea why no one said anything. If my father was willing to disinherit me for something as simple as supporting a different political candidate, I could only imagine the lengths he would go to protect his ‘family legacy.’ I refused to believe it was because no one cared enough. There were too many good people in this world to think that way.

I gave myself a mental shake. It wasn’t my job to judge who did or didn’t do whatever they did or didn’t do over the years. It was my job to find the truth and present it. Nothing more or less.

I leaned forward again, this time looking at the picture as a whole. I was confident that the man in that picture and the man being advertised as for sale was the same man, but I couldn’t just put those two things on camera and come up with a whole new history for my family. That meant more research.

The woman in front of Joshua was too young to be his wife. Maybe. This was the 1800s, so age differences were looked at differently. Still, my gut said they were related, not married. They didn’t resemble each other, though. Joshua’s features were sharp. High cheekbones and an angular face.

A familiar angular face.

I frowned, my eyes moving from the groom to the slave, then back again. Again. Again.

Shit.

“They have some of the same facial features.”

Owners having children with their slaves wasn’t as uncommon as a lot of people wanted to believe. Most people knew the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemming, though the accuracy of the claim was still being debated, even after DNA testing showed a strong likelihood that someone from the Jefferson male line was in their lineage. Even if it hadn’t been Thomas Jefferson who’d done it, the man who’d fathered Sally’s children could have been one of his male relatives. And it was impossible to know whether or not Sally had consented to sex.

That was the other reality no one with Southern roots wanted to acknowledge. The majority of owner-slave children came from rape, whether the violent sort or the more…subtle kind where the slave didn’t fight it, but they also didn’t really have a choice either.

If I was right about the reason for the resemblance between Obadiah and Joshua, I wondered about the how as much as the who. No family tree was ever perfect, and I was sure everyone had at least a few criminals taking up a branch or two along the way. The one thing I’d had to accept when I’d decided on this project was that I would probably find things about my ancestors that would make me sick to my stomach. Rape would definitely be one of those things I didn’t know how to handle.

Nyx’s face flashed into my mind.

I couldn’t change anything, not in anyone’s past, but I could try to bring the wrongs to light, to make sure that those who could be held responsible would be, and those who’d survived got whatever closure they could. Maybe that’s what I could do for my next film. Nyx could even help me with the research. It could help her deal with–

Nope.

I wasn’t going there.

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