My friend Phil Latham has started Identifying Slaves, a project to collect and publish information on people who were enslaved.
It’s a subscription service, $5 a month. Each piece includes several short stories, drawn from public records. Each is about a person, each with a name — often only one. Each has a little information about a life.
It’s heartbreaking. We know so little about the human beings who were treated so unjustly — and of course that lack of information was a choice. People who were enslaved were given little attention, little consideration, for a reason. People doing the enslaving didn’t want to think about what they were doing.
We know little. But it seems doubly wrong to forget what little we do know. That, too, would be a choice.
When he started doing research, Phil said the information was overwhelming. Hard to read, he said, and yet hard to stop reading. I’ve had the same reaction.
If you’d like to see a sample, you’ll find it here:
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