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1/3 As someone who writes about slavery through the prism of law, the striking thing is how the stories of people who were enslaved are lost and buried. I’m almost done with an article in which the plaintiff was enslaved as a child.
2/3 And, while I’ve been able to find every historical detail about the characters in the case, the plaintiff remains a shadow, forever out of reach. Every once in a while I find her in an old census from 1870, and then 1880, but then she slips out of view.
3/3 It’s like someone familiar walking ahead of you in a crowd and just as you catch up she disappears around a corner. There’s a metaphor somewhere in there about the black experience in America, but that metaphor too, like the plaintiff, remains just barely out of reach.
