Have you ever met someone who had been enslaved?
Until recently, I would have answered that question without hesitation.
No.
Slavery belonged, in my mind, to grainy photographs, courthouse records, faded census pages, and museum exhibits. It was unquestionably real, but safely distant, separated from the present by generations too numerous to count.
Then I had a phone conversation with my great-uncle while researching my family’s history.
We were talking about our ancestors when he casually mentioned one of our older relatives. After we hung up, something stopped me. He had actually known someone who had been born into slavery.
The realization forced me to rethink how I understood American history. If my great-uncle had known someone born enslaved, who else had? How many people still carried memories that reached directly back to slavery?
One conversation led to another. One memory unlocked another. Before long, I wasn’t simply interviewing fellow Virginians. I was speaking with people who had sat on porches with formerly enslaved men and women, attended church beside them, shared meals with them, and listened as they described lives that had begun in bondage.
The farther I followed those memories, the shorter American history became.
That realization arrives at a remarkable moment. This August marks five centuries since the first recorded enslaved Africans arrived in what would become the United States; 81 years before Jamestown and nearly 250 years before the Declaration of Independence, a group of 100 Africans landed with a Spanish expedition along the South Carolina coast. Within months they resisted. The settlement collapsed, and many escaped, likely finding refuge among Indigenous communities in what are now South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
In 1526, slavery did not take root. Nearly a century later, in 1619, it did.
Americans understandably devote enormous attention to the nation’s 250th birthday. Yet Black America quietly reaches another milestone. Its story on this continent stretches back 500 years, not merely to the nation’s founding but to the arrival of people who would spend centuries resisting bondage while helping build the country itself.
As I reflected on that anniversary, another question emerged. Could anyone still remember someone who had actually been enslaved?
I realized I wasn’t simply collecting family stories. I was documenting one of the last generations of Americans who had personally known people born into slavery. Soon those living witnesses would be gone forever.
I began with my own family. Every year we gather for the Daniel and Flem Adams family reunion in Southside Virginia. Daniel Adams was born in 1850 while enslaved. His brother, Flem Adams Jr., followed a decade later. I assumed everyone who had known Daniel and Flem Jr. had long since passed away.
I was wrong. My great-aunt, Rosezenia Adams Clark, now 90, smiled when I mentioned Daniel.
“That was my PaPa,” she recalled.
When I asked whether he had really been as tall as family stories claimed, she nodded and raised her hand well above my own six-foot-three frame.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Way up there.”
More than a century collapsed into a conversation lasting only a few minutes. The people I knew as elderly relatives had once known people born in slavery as grandparents.
Another community elder, Howard Adams, told me he had known both Daniel and Flem Jr.
“So, you know,” he said, “I knew both of them. And our line of the Adamses goes back two generations past them.”
His words stayed with me long after our conversation ended. We go back. Personally. Each conversation seemed to pull the past a little closer.
While speaking at a book event in Blacksburg, I met Virginia Tech researcher Dr. Margie Lee. During a later conversation, she mentioned someone she had known as a child. Her grandmother often took the family to visit Cousin Judy, Judia Ward, outside Lynchburg. Ward had been born enslaved.
Dr. Lee remembers Cousin Judy describing the arrival of Union troops after Appomattox and, in her own words, how freedom reached her community. Historical records later confirmed that federal troops had indeed passed through the area exactly as Ward remembered.
Ward died in 1981 at the reported age of 113. I stopped and did the math.
Someone who had been 40 years old when Ward died would now be in their eighties. Someone who had been 20 would now be in their sixties.
Suddenly, the people who had met formerly enslaved Americans were no longer figures from another era. They were our parents, grandparents, teachers, pastors, neighbors and coworkers.
The distance separating slavery from modern America kept shrinking. My search eventually led me to Halifax County and to Edith Edmunds.
At 101, Edmunds defies nearly every stereotype about aging. She still quilts, writes books, speaks publicly and teaches the history of Underground Railroad symbolism stitched into African American quilting traditions.
I asked whether she remembered anyone born into slavery. Her grandfather, Robert Dewy Rone Sr., had been born enslaved, but he died when she was very young. She instead told me about her grandmother, Julia Walker Rone, whom the family believes was likely born into slavery.
Edmunds remembered Julia spending evenings in the family helping to assemble quilts. Women gathered to stitch together scraps of worn clothing into blankets that warmed 13 children through Southside Virginia winters.
She also remembered her grandmother making ash cakes in the fireplace, a simple mixture of cornmeal and water baked beneath hot ashes.
What sounded like childhood nostalgia carried much older echoes. Ash cakes had long sustained enslaved families because they required almost nothing to prepare. They could be cooked beside cabins, in fields, or wherever a small fire could be built.
History survived not only through official documents but through recipes, quilts, stories and ordinary family rituals passed from one generation to the next.
Another conversation carried me farther still. Henry Hurt, the former Reader’s Digest editor-at-large and owner of Shade Tree Rare Books in Chatham, remembered visiting a man named Sam Lovelace.
As a 10-year-old boy around 1950, Hurt regularly stopped at Lovelace’s home while walking to work at Chatham Hall Dairy. Lovelace had been born enslaved in 1846.
Hurt was fascinated by “Uncle Sam” because he was over 100 years old. Lovelace passed at 107.
By the time my conversations ended, I realized I had started with the wrong assumption.
Five hundred years had seemed unimaginably distant because I had been measuring history in dates. History is not measured only in years. It is measured in people.
One formerly enslaved grandfather tells stories to his granddaughter. She grows up and shares them with her daughter. That daughter passes them to her children. A great-aunt repeats them at a family reunion. A researcher asks one more question.
Inevitably, people who personally remember enslaved people will pass on, and for the first time since emancipation, the living chain connecting Americans to slavery will finally be broken.
That is why this 500-year anniversary matters. It is not simply the anniversary of the first recorded enslaved Africans arriving in 1526. It is the last major anniversary we may observe while Americans are still alive who can say, from personal experience rather than inherited history, that they once shook the hand of someone born in bondage.
If someone asked me today whether I have ever met someone who had been enslaved, my answer would still be no. But I have spent the past year listening to people who did.
Their memories remind us that slavery is not confined to archives or museums. Until very recently, it lived in kitchens, churches, family reunions, front porches and ordinary conversations.
History did not disappear. It simply kept introducing itself from one generation to the next.
Five hundred years sounds impossibly distant. It isn’t. It has always been only a few hands apart.
Jeff Bennett is the author of The Black Belt of Virginia: Untold Stories of African American History, published by The History Press.
