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ix hours later, we had made it through about half of the documents, and we had five sheets of paper with names and a few dates. Ned’s name had only appeared twice—once in an inventory from about 1830—“Ned, boy – 12”—and the other in one of the account books where Popson says, “$3.00 to Ned for chickens.” So we knew that Ned raised chickens. I wasn’t much of a chicken person, but that kind of made me like him more.
Still, that didn’t tell us enough to give us much of Ned’s story, and while we’d been searching for his, we’d compiled dozens of other names—most of which were for other enslaved people at the Popson place. There was years of work here to pull these stories together, Shamila said, and we weren’t even done going through the documents.
We had, though, begun to make some o
