Should you purchase a good lot for walking I will bring them out by land this summer,” Franklin had written. “We have about ten thousand dollars to pay yet. He worked for a partnership of slave dealers called Franklin & Armfield, run by his uncle. Among the hundreds of hard-to-read and yellowing papers, I found one note dated April 16, 1834, from a man named James Franklin in Natchez, Mississippi, to the home office of his company in Virginia. Not long ago I was reading some old letters at the library of the University of North Carolina, doing a little unearthing of my own. Virginia Delegate Delores McQuinn has helped raise funds for a heritage site that will show the excavated remains of Lumpkin’s slave jail. “You see, our history is often buried,” she says. She has helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkin’s Jail. One of her proudest accomplishments in politics, she says, has been to throw new light on an alternate history.įor example, she persuaded the city to fund a tourist walk about slavery, a kind of mirror image of the Freedom Trail in Boston.

She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacy-a city crowded with monuments to the Old South.

“And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.” “The intent was to keep that history buried,” McQuinn says today. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. “The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. “My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’ He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived-in the same house and on the same land-in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond. When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family’s roots.

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