2 weeks Ago
My daughter and I recently read the American Girl series featuring Addy Walker. The character is enslaved but escapes a plantation in North Carolina and moves to Philadelphia with her mother. By the end of the series, Addy is reunited with everyone in her family: her father, brother, baby sister – even her Auntie Lula.
The story is challenging and endearing, but I realized that the romance of a perfect reunion on Christmas Day is perhaps the book’s biggest act of fiction. “Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families,” By Judith Giesberg. Simon & Schuster.
307 pages. $29.99 Simon & Schuster Judith Giesberg’s new book, “Last Seen,” gives a far less idyllic picture of how formerly enslaved people connected – and more often, did not – with their lost families.
In this deeply researched and beautifully written book, Giesberg, a professor of history at Villanova University, lays out the challenges of reunification, adding an important entry into the history of enslavement in the United States. Her work stems largely from the database she created and curates, the Last Seen archive. There she has brought together newspaper advertisements in which formerly enslaved people sought to find family members they had been separated from in the most heartless ways.
Together with Signe Fourmy, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and graduate students, Giesberg has compiled more than 4,500 such ads. Slavery was incredibly violent to the institution of the Black family. The damage inflicted by a lifetime of domination – whippings, sexual assault and other forms of exploitation – is incalculable.
But amid such a brutal system, we tend to forget to think of enslaved people as mothers, fathers, lovers, siblings, children, grandparents and friends. Enslaved people depended upon – if not wholly survived off – these relationships. One of the greatest forms of violence took place at the auction block.
The selling and severance of enslaved families created wounds and trauma that could never be fully repaired. Separation was not rare, it was common. Scholars estimate that 1 in 3 enslaved families were separated by enslavers, who would sell their human property during financial hardship or to punish a rebellious enslaved person – or simply out of spite.
All at once or one at a time, an enslaved mother could lose her children to a purchase. No relationship was protected. The numbers are haunting.
Giesberg reveals that by 1860, “1 million enslaved people had been sold from the Upper South to the Deep South,” and about 25 percent of those sold were between the ages of 8 and 15. Many children were never seen again. These sales were often referred to as the “weeping time,” when family members would be taken away.
Goodbyes were not promised and always cut short if they did occur. So, when freedom came for enslaved people, one of the first actions they took was to seek out their loved ones. In desperation, they placed ads in newspapers all over the country, searching for a stolen child, parent or other relative.
They invested what little money they had in these ads, to inform anyone who could read how to find them. The appeals for information offered names, locations, distinctive markers – and always the hope for reunification. “I would like to know the whereabouts of my brother (Lias Tibbs), who belonged to Mrs.
Moore Carter. He left Warrenton, Tarquier County 58 years ago, and was sold,” one read. Some advertisements were posted decades after slavery ended.
The Last Seen website includes stories of people who have only recently found their ancestors. Each of Giesberg’s chapters details the search for a son or daughter, spouse or parent. One moving chapter tells the story of Tally Miller, who was the father to at least seven children.
While enslaved in South Carolina, he was sold away from his two daughters, Caroline and Sarah, and sent more than 800 miles away to Louisiana. But Miller never stopped looking for his daughters. Eventually he gained freedom and managed to purchase 200 acres of land, a feat for any former enslaved person.
But his greatest wish was to be reunited with his children. Almost 50 years after their separation, Miller was still hoping to find them; at age 89, he placed an ad in the Southwestern Christian Advocate. Miller’s loss is a story of enduring love.
He found freedom, but he was never reunited with his daughters. “Last Seen” is not a romanticized history. Giesberg forces readers to sit with the trauma of separation and the callousness of White supremacy.
But equally, if not more, important is her tender human reminder that the love parents and siblings and children had for their family members never waned. Mothers went to the grave yearning for their lost children. While there are stories of reunification, they are rare.
In fact, Giesberg estimates that only 2 percent of Black families found the loved ones they were searching for. There was far more separation and searching than reunification. Sometimes reunions were messy and rife with rejection, particularly between lost lovers.
The chapter “Husbands and Wives” reveals the challenges of looking for a loved one who moved on to someone else. In Giesberg’s digital collection of advertisements, “spousal searches are the least common type.” Because marriage was not legal for enslaved people, getting officially married post-emancipation was a priority.
However, finding lost lovers was a major challenge and particularly complicated if a partner married another before they could be reconnected. “Last Seen” illustrates what it means to search for someone or, in many instances, the loss of not knowing that you were being sought. Giesberg is delicately working through what can only be labeled grief.
And she is writing to recount and restore the dignity, love and determination of restless souls. This history deserves to be read widely, taught carefully and preserved indefinitely. Kellie Carter Jackson is chair of the Africana studies department at Wellesley College and the author of “We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance.
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