--- title: Imani Perry's Search for Answers About Her Enslaved Ancestor description: Read an excerpt from Imani Perry's new book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. canonical: https://time.com/6139077/imani-perry-south-to-america-excerpt/ author: Imani Perry article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-01-13T22:39:24.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-12T00:02:37.000Z article:section: History og:title: I Searched for Answers About My Enslaved Ancestor. I Found Questions About America og:description: 'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?' og:url: https://time.com/6139077/imani-perry-south-to-america-excerpt/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8952edf1aaa159f0/698a21ba4ee2629f36319d21/imani-perry-identity-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: imani-perry-identity-1 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: I Searched for Answers About My Enslaved Ancestor. I Found Questions About America twitter:description: 'Did slavery make home always somewhere else?' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8952edf1aaa159f0/698a21ba4ee2629f36319d21/imani-perry-identity-1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # I Searched for Answers About My Enslaved Ancestor. What I Found Was More Questions > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=ac6017ed-2afb-4476-8a6c-aaedb6da77ab&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=ac6017ed-2afb-4476-8a6c-aaedb6da77ab&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: Black Wall Streets [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: Black Wall Streets](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/W3Zny2Gh.m3u8) (10:26)  _Published 2021-05-28. It's been 100 years since the Tulsa race massacre, when an angry white mob destroyed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa Oklahoma. But Tulsa's story is part of a larger history of Black Wall Streets that existed in many American cities._ by [Imani Perry](https://time.com/author/imani-perry/) ## Imani Perry Updated: Dec 12, 2023 12:02 AM UTCPublished: Jan 13, 2022 10:39 PM UTC  Artist Billie Carter-Rankin's treatment of an image published in the 1920s. Artist Billie Carter-Rankin's treatment of an image published in the 1920s. Photo-Illustration by Billie Carter-Rankin for TIME (Source Photo: Library of Congress) by [Imani Perry](https://time.com/author/imani-perry/) ## Imani Perry Updated: Dec 12, 2023 12:02 AM UTCPublished: Jan 13, 2022 10:39 PM UTC A few years ago, I began to look every so often at the two Census reports where my one known ancestor from Maryland appears: 1870 and 1880\. I’m always hoping to discover something I missed—about myself, about my past. Every gaze is a moment of wonder and frustration. There she is, twice. In 1870, she is Easter Lowe. Born in Maryland in 1769, 101 years old, Black. In 1880, she is Esther Watkins, born in Georgia in 1789, 91 years old, widowed, Black. Both improbable and extraordinary. In rare, lighter moments, it makes me think of Mark Twain’s humorous story about [George Washington](https://time.com/5772948/george-washington-biography-alexis-coe/)’s mammy, Joice Heth, who in newspaper report after newspaper report kept getting older until her age rivaled Methuselah’s (as we say it). Whereas Twain noted a sentimentalism toward the old plantation darky that verged on the ridiculous, my own ancestor’s imprecision is a bitter wound. And I have some awe, too, at what must have been a daunting attempt to name her age. “How to place her in history?” somebody speculated. Most of the time I feel a combination of reverence and sadness. It is unlikely I will ever know what happened or when exactly she was born. I can guess. The ages are probably wrong but could be right. There were some enslaved people who lived to extraordinarily old ages. Perhaps she was sold from Maryland down the river. Maybe from a man named Lowe to a man named Watkins who wanted to settle the Georgia frontier. And later, as Mississippi was carved out of Georgia and Alabama out of Mississippi, she, a woman who at least by one account was born before the nation was a nation, was still living, an elderly freedwoman in Madison County, Ala. **_Read more:_** [_A New Report Finds That 45 States Are ‘Failing’ to Teach Students About the Period That Shaped Race Relations After the Civil War_](https://time.com/6128421/teaching-reconstruction-study/) Even if I doubt her age, there is [the AncestryDNA evidence](https://time.com/5057004/questlove-finding-roots-last-slave-ship/) that says I descend from people who lived in early 18th century Virginia. Inexact borders aside, what holds is this: we came before America was America. This woman who bore the name either of my favorite biblical queen or my favorite holiday was here, not as an accomplice to the settler colony, but as the victim of its displacement and captivity. She was a witness to the very exclusions that laid the foundation for the creation of a national identity. It is a remarkable status. I wanted to travel to Maryland, to see something about my ancestral beginnings, but I had no idea of where to go. I ultimately chose to go to Annapolis, the capital. It is a precious town. One that is self-consciously old, like it was manicured that way. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for there at first. I just went.  The William Paca House in Annapolis, Md. Vespasian/Alamy --- You’d be hard-pressed to find a Deep Southerner who would ever call Maryland or Washington, D.C., the South. Even [the storied history of enslaved people from Maryland](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/the-not-quite-free-state-maryland-dragged-its-feet-on-emancipation-during-civil-war/2013/09/13/a34d35de-fec7-11e2-bd97-676ec24f1f3f%5Fstory.html) doesn’t keep it from seeming Northern. Not Alethia Browning Tanner, an enslaved woman who sold vegetables directly outside of the White House. Not even [Frederick Douglass](https://time.com/5614930/frederick-douglass-fourth-of-july/) and [Harriet Tubman](https://time.com/5715477/harriet-tubman-escape/), heroes of history who were both held captive in Maryland. I still am reticent to call the mid-Atlantic South the South. And yet I have learned in the course of my travels that there are “Souths,” plural as much as singular, despite my Deep South bias. I know that while the South is a determined thing, it is also a shifting and varied one. Re-declared many times as a fact, it echoes far beyond its moving borders. There was a particular place I had learned about as I was digging around in stories of Maryland, and I wanted to get to it in order to figure out what I was looking for here. I’d read that there was a pub where founding fathers used to drink, carouse and sell Black people. And it is still open. My phone GPS went topsy-turvy for a little bit, but eventually I found the tavern. I stepped inside, hoping to feel something mystical. Nothing. It was dimly lit and fairly inglorious. I sat awkwardly in a black-painted wood chair, alone and facing a young family with a little girl in a high chair, with the bar behind me. I ate fish fried in a thick batter. The pocket of heat under the skin was tongue-burning but increased the sweetness of the flesh. I drank cranberry juice with ice cubes too large to chew. I looked at the fixtures; I looked at the floor. It was disorientingly dark. As historians of slavery have noted, our images of auction blocks are more theatrical than the reality often was. [Regular places were sites of the trade in people](https://time.com/5956450/domestic-slave-trade/). The everydayness of disaster was a feature of slave society. We might be inclined to look for somewhere to place a memorial or an altar to the past that we can treat as particularly hallowed ground. But the truth is that this mundane place where I was served cranberry juice and fish by a young White man with flopping brown hair and an eager smile is exactly where my foreparents might have been wrenched away from everything they loved. Matter-of-fact, like that. When I went outside again, the sunlight felt like it was about to blind me. --- ### More from TIME --- Next, I decided, I’d visit two historic museum homes of which Annapolis boasts. The first was under construction. I made it to the second just in time for a docent-led tour. It began inauspiciously. The guide was lovely, but the moment the phrase “Those nasty Indians tried to fight us, and we had to fight back” came out of her mouth, chill bumps raised on my forearms. Well, I thought, this might be some good material. Not a moment later a manager ran up to me: “I heard you’re working on a book!” I hadn’t intended to be treated as though I was there on an official visit. But I accepted her graciousness. She told me that I could take a hard hat tour of the building that was under construction and gave me her card, which I promptly lost. And then she followed up, explaining, “We are trying to tell the history more thoroughly. That house is where we found artifacts that relate to the history of enslaved people in Maryland.” Her words were offered gingerly and with sensitivity. I didn’t inquire further. I wasn’t interested in making an indictment or issuing praise. I was just trying to see how the back-then is inside the now.  We walked through rooms restored with great detail. Historic preservation is a painstaking business, especially when it comes to paint colors and fabrics. It is a matter of samples and formulas, mailing them back and forth and cross-referencing up the wazoo and things being not quite right until they are iterated to perfection. Unexpectedly, the docent turned and looked at me wide-eyed. “I hate to tell you. But I have to talk about”—and she whispered the word—“slavery.” I shrugged. “Well, yes,” she said, “it did happen.” “Yes. It did,” I replied. **_Read more:_** [_The 21 Most Anticipated Books of 2022_](https://time.com/6128413/most-anticipated-books-2022/) My companions on the tour were a lovely couple, older and White. They were deeply interested in history and preservation and traveled frequently to experience both. The woman, a Kentuckian with a thin gray bowl haircut and a smile so earnest it looked like it belonged on a 12-year-old, struggled a bit. These old homes are hard to move about in if you have a physical disability. Before we made it to the basement, my bowl-cut companion needed to sit. The docent led her and her husband to the garden. I walked down a set of stairs and joined in on another tour. --- A young White couple recently graduated from Georgetown University was listening. They were smartly but casually dressed, with studiously respectful expressions on their faces. Standing in the kitchen, this docent told us that the enslaved woman in charge of the cooking slept there, on the floor in front of the hearth. It was freezing cold in the winter and sweltering in the summer. On a kitchen table, which, compared to the elaborately set dining table upstairs, was rough-hewn, a feast awaited delivery. I wondered who brought upstairs the sumptuous meals replicated in plastic. Then the guide said something that stuck in my craw. Slave cooks had to possess [a great deal of knowledge](https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2021/6095925/jessica-b-harris/). They had to understand science and math, even though they were illiterate. They had to keep track of proportion, the distribution of heat and the ingredients to every meal they made. The docent pointed to a device, gleaming metal with a pulley, that was used to turn meat in order for it to be fully cooked; though it aided the task, cooking still required rapt attention. Maybe because I have spent my entire adult life studying and researching with the control and aid of books, archives and computers, the colonization of this Black woman’s mind hit me hard. I have long known that each purchase of a slave was an investment. The feeding and clothing of one was as well. The task was to keep them alive enough to work and procreate, and cheap enough to yield the highest profit margin. Also, they were supposed to be abused enough to terrorize them out of retaliation. It has often been noted that slaves were denied knowledge as a way to keep them docile. But some, like the builders, the blacksmiths, the plantation botanists and the cooks, were required to hold vast knowledge and steady it in their minds and memory because pen and paper were denied. **_Read more:_** [_‘I Will Not Allow That to Be Your Life.’ A Mother’s Letter to Her Black Sons on Growing Up in America_](https://time.com/5678310/breathe-imani-perry/) The life task of the enslaved person was to stay alive and where possible love and find some joy. I imagined this cook lying on this intact ground, shivering, sweltering, alone and knowing. An archive in her head, her name left on no ledger, no wall in this house. There is no recording of the precise color of her flesh or apron. I imagined her smacked for an error or patronizingly praised, and aching. Eventually arthritic, smiled at for making the loveliest cakes, until, like her birth, her death came and went without public notice. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I felt a momentary relief that if my ancestor, Easter or Esther, worked here, I didn’t know it. --- I wonder if Easter or Esther looked at the ships, like Frederick Douglass did, longingly. I wonder if she dreamed of boarding one and finding another place to be or returning to her mother’s home. Easter Lowe, or Esther Watkins, is my ancestor and my muse. I set her alongside the documented stories of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Home is such a jealously guarded concept in my life, so specific. I don’t know how it was in hers. Did slavery make home always somewhere else? In [_Barracoon_](https://time.com/5272335/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-published/), Zora Neale Hurston made clear that “home” for the last Africans brought here on slave ships was different than it was for African Americans, for whom this was the only place they knew. Home was vexed but here. For the Africans, it remained out there. Without knowing how close or far Africa was in Easter’s life, my thoughts could not even be convincingly speculative.  Artist Billie Carter-Rankin's treatment of an image published in between 1936-1938. Photo-Illustration by Billie Carter-Rankin for TIME (Source Photo: Library of Congress) When it comes to memory and slavery, there are people who center their concern on the gaps and absences. They dwell on the grief of silences. And there are people who every day are fitting puzzle pieces together to find as much truth and detail as possible. Both are essential. We, descendants of the incomplete puzzle, know a good deal about dwelling in rough, negotiated spaces. Trapping places where intimacy existed despite the fact that law did not recognize its sanctity. Places where life and death and woundedness and love all persisted. But did our ancestors truly feel at home? (Do we?) Was home some affect in the ether, hard to hold, or a future perfect tension, imagined as part of some freedom to come? This word that I hold in my mouth, ever and always meaning the state where I was born—_home_ is not something I am sure had meaning before freedom. _Adapted from_ [South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a ](https://bookshop.org/a/4973/9780062977403)[Nation](https://bookshop.org/a/4973/9780062977403) _by Imani Perry, available Jan. 25 from Ecco/HarperCollins._ **Correction, Jan. 25:** _The original version of this story misspelled the first name of an enslaved woman who sold vegetables outside the White House. She was Alethia Browning Tanner, not Althea._ ## Transcript The legacies of black wall Street's, it's important for people to remember because there were so many people who have no idea that there were vital Dynamic places where African Americans were living out their vision of the American dream opportunity in Hope and progress of for their community. June 1st 2021 Marcel hundred years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, as many as 300, people were killed as an angry white mob, destroyed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa. Oklahoma once known as that City's Black Wall Street story is part of a larger history of segregated prosperity in many American cities around the turn of the century. So ask Jim Crow begins to really take shape and African-Americans are forced into segregated parts of the city. These communities rise up in places like Durham North Carolina and Little Rock Arkansas, Jackson, Mississippi, and people began to notice that up there all kinds of businesses and services that grow there. And so they kind of take on the name Black Wall Street. One of the biggest and longest lasting black wall. Street's was in Richmond. Virginia. A neighborhood called Jackson Ward. So the factors that led to Richmond's being the cradle of black capitalism, lay in the diverse slave economy, that existed at that time. So you had African American who were involved and not just agricultural slavery but also an urban and Industrial slavery end after the Civil War II. Had this concentrated community of African Americans who have been working in the city in factories and it feels and rural areas around Richmond has continued to build the institutions and the community and the neighborhood that they had begun even before the war. And then you begin to have a lot of really important, but natural first, such as insurance companies and Banks, which really highlight Richmond as the first Black Wall Street. One of the most storied figures in Jackson Ward history was a banker and business woman named Maggie Lena Walker. You cannot study magazine Walker and not be fascinated you do with her, she was born in slaved in 1864 on, right? Towards the end of the Civil War, and really saw economic empowerment of African American women as the path forward Locker started, her banking career at a mutual Aid Society, called The Independent order of St, Luke 1867 St. Luke was established to help freed slaves. Gain economic independence in 1901 and she said, I'm specifically talking to the women here. Look, good women here. Whose money is in this organization and she was able to bring that Vision to fruition in 1903. When she became the first black woman Bank president. St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Later named the Consolidated Bank and Trust was acquired in 2005, but Walker's home in Jackson. Ward is still standing. As you see around me, the homes have been restored on the outside while mrs. Walker's home. It's been restored to its full Glory as much as we could using artifacts that belong to Maggie Walker and her family, because we still get a lot of people who come in and do our chores, and they are still amazing. Why didn't I know about her before? Why have I not heard the story? And it is a story that has been preserved quite fully in Richmond itself, but not so much across the country. What is happening now in Jacksonville? Or is that those who remember, the stories are coming together to make sure that they are no longer for God neighborhood? We not look as it did when she walks these streets, but the memories are still there. In his Heyday, I imagine that it was a fabulous to live and Jackson board that you needed. You could get your in Jackson Ward, and I will just say walking into the st. Luke Bank on, I think had to be a treat. First of all, making me walk or made sure that he was beautifully appointed with mahogany and marble and I can just imagine a made of domestic. I'm working in a white person's home in another part of the city and she walks into the bank. And she's greeted probably didn't, but by not just her first name, but she's call miss or missus, and I just can't imagine that it is height Jackson, Ward was an incredible experience, but then there's also the dark side and that is that it is a segregated community. Magalina Walker accommodate segregation by real ending mostly in the segregated areas. Are so there I think in the midst of this in affluent and its dynamism. There's always that dark cloud of racism in Jim Crow that kind of just outside there is a a world that wants to continue to treat them as second-class Citizens. Jackson word with a Haven for black business for many years but like Tulsa was Black Wall Street. It to you came to an end, the difference between the end of Jackson, Ward, and the end of Tulsa, is really a difference in degree. And so for Jackson, Ward, it was more of a slow death. A wide range of factors caused Jackson Ward's, economic decline, including redlining, which kept Capital out of black neighborhoods, slum clearance, where City's raise old buildings without rebuilding in certain areas and a highway system that cut right through the neighborhood. But the final end to Jackson Ward's. Black Wall Street days, came on the heels of the civil rights movement and desegregation. So ironically at the very time that you begin to have opportunity at least legally for African Americans to have equal accommodation, to be able to get you no equal access to education is at the same time that these communities have been so undermined in the decades previous and so when they have choices to make, they in a move to the suburbs and the Really the most vulnerable and needy living in places like Jackson Ward. The occurrence of diminishing. Black wealth has a long history in our country. I mean really takes root in slavery. There you have hundreds and hundreds of years of unpaid black labor, and then be disenfranchised and their wealthy undermined and other ways. I think that we just really have to deal with this long-standing American exploitation of African Americans. You can go to your bank tomorrow and you can say until you as a corporation start to speak on our behalf. I want all my money in recent years, there has been a movement to reinvest funds into black Banks and businesses. One of the organizations advocating for this financial shift is Bank Black USA which helps people find and invest in Black banks for people to move their money from the larger institutions that had it. Maybe a history of discriminatory practices and predatory lending practices and move that money to in the eyes with their minority depository Institution. According to the FDIC mdi's are more likely to lend to lower and moderate-income communities and help promote economic viability in these areas, found out that black financial institutions are under supported in under capitalize, right? Black banks are in Decline. For example, there was like, Fifty of these institutions in 2001 and 2021 and very nearly 20, our solution was to create resources for people to be able to compare the banks and services, and financial help the community impact it. Because we do believe that these empty eyes. Can you play an integral role in closing that racial wealth Gap with the support? It if you don't learn about the origin and history of Blackwell, you'll fall into the Trap of thinking that there was no, Blackwell. The time to learn about Jackson would take time to learn about Durham a time to learn about Tulsa. Let's ring the stories for word, and remember those times of black Excellence, it can come again, if we follow the road now cuz they said before us, ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6139077/imani-perry-south-to-america-excerpt/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6139077/imani-perry-south-to-america-excerpt/"},"headline":"I Searched for Answers About My Enslaved Ancestor. 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