The Weight of a Name

Two friends—one descended from enslavers, one from the enslaved—travel to Montgomery, Alabama, to see if private remembrance can withstand public forgetting.

Somewhere near the center of the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama, I saw it: Spalding—one name among thousands engraved there, drawn from the historical record of slavery. For a moment everything else receded. I put my palm to the warm burnt-orange metal and wondered who it might have been, someone held by my ancestors, or another branch of the same tree. The name pulsed in broad daylight, no longer buried in ledgers but remembered publicly, permanently.

Nearby, Devin Berry was scanning the wall with the museum’s app, searching for his own family name. When he found it, he stood quietly for a long moment, taking it in. I called him over. The name, Spalding, was the same one carried by people my ancestors had enslaved, and together we stood before it, both our names between us.

Devin, a friend and fellow traveler, is a guiding teacher and board member at the Insight Meditation Society, where I serve as a director. He descends from enslaved people; I from enslavers. We had come to Montgomery together to stand inside that history.

I had planned the trip because I wanted to stand in front of the evidence while I still could. Lately, the country is uneasy with its own memory, though in truth we have never been entirely at ease with that history. What cannot be erased is rewritten; what cannot be rewritten is excused. Even the plainest evidence—the scars on a man’s back, the chains in a museum case—has become “too divisive” for public display.

I went to Montgomery with Devin in September 2025. It was not quite a trip, but a pilgrimage, and I had two reasons for going. One was to seek out and honestly accept an ignoble truth: my ancestors had been enslavers. The other was to experience that truth with a friend whose ancestors had been enslaved.

Some people come to ancestry looking for a tidy lineage—stories of courage, sacrifice, and noble character that can be held up proudly as family heirlooms. In my mother’s family, I have one of those stories. My great-great-grandfather, Charles P. Peirce of Peabody, Massachusetts, was drafted into the Union Army during the Civil War. He could have avoided service by paying the government $300, a commutation fee allowed by law. A friend even offered to lend him the money. But Peirce refused, saying he had been fairly drafted and the country needed all the men it could get.

He joined Company B of the 18th Massachusetts Infantry in July 1863 and within months saw combat in Virginia—Rappahannock Station and Mine Run—battles fought in bitter cold and punishing conditions. In 1864 he was captured by Confederate forces and imprisoned in two of the South’s most notorious camps: Libby Prison in Richmond and Andersonville in Georgia. At war’s end, he was released through Annapolis, Maryland, weighing only seventy-five pounds. The family story was that he had to crawl on his hands and knees until he could walk again. Whether or not he walked all the way home, as my great-grandmother claimed, the image holds the same truth: he survived, but at terrible cost.

It’s the kind of story you display prominently, and I have, literally. His June 29, 1865 military discharge paper hangs framed in the entryway of my home, a daily reminder of the principles he embodied, the sort of ancestor one might be proud to claim.

My father’s side, however, carries a different story. One shrouded in secrecy I had never been told. For generations, it was simply unknown to us that our ancestors had enslaved people.

What I’ve uncovered in the last few years isn’t the sort of history you hang in a frame by the front door. But it’s no less a part of who we are. The Spaldings, Abells, Buckmans, Mattinglys, Fenwicks, Thomases, and Mills—families from whom I descend—were part of the Maryland-to-Kentucky migration of the late eighteenth century, bringing enslaved people with them. The more I learn, the harder it becomes to separate virtue from harm, or goodness from complicity.

My great-great-grandfather, John B. Spalding, appears in the 1860 Federal Slave Schedule with eight people enslaved in his Marion County, Kentucky, household. That truth never reached my father’s generation—not through concealment or malice, but because a link broke.

In the early 1890s my great-grandfather, John David Spalding, moved his young family from Kentucky to Bedford, Indiana. He died of tuberculosis in September 1894—eight months before my grandfather was born—and nine years later his wife, Savilla, also died. The children scattered. Survival took precedence, and the past fell away.

In my father’s papers, I later found a 1951 letter from my grandfather to his siblings. He’d been studying a list of Kentucky Spaldings in a genealogy book, trying to trace the family. “If any of you know any of the old names, such as first and middle names of our grandfather or great-grandfather,” he wrote, “I can probably get the whole line figured out.” From what I’ve since learned—and from conversations with my father decades later—none of them knew either name. It seems my grandfather went to his grave never knowing that their grandfather was John B. Spalding. That loss of memory became its own inheritance.

My responsibility now is to know it whole, to keep the praise and the pain in the same frame.

Which is why the present moment feels urgent. After Donald Trump resumed the presidency in January 2025, I knew I had to see certain places while I still could. Reports made clear that the Smithsonian—especially the National Museum of African American History and Culture—was coming under renewed political scrutiny, its exhibitions singled out as “divisive.” So, earlier that summer, before any changes were announced on site, I went to the museum in Washington. I wanted to be in its presence—objects, voices, names—before the story could be softened, or worse, outright obliterated.

From there, my resolve turned south to Montgomery and the Legacy Sites of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative—sites built to make visible a history too often buried, to face the legacy of racial injustice and the wounds it left behind. I had wanted to visit them ever since they opened in 2018. Unlike federal museums, EJI’s sites are privately funded and somewhat safer from political interference. I went to learn what I could about our true national history, and especially anything that might illuminate my family’s ties to slavery in Kentucky and Maryland.

The Legacy project’s insistence on truth feels especially urgent at a time when some political leaders have suggested that enslaved people “benefited” from slavery because it taught them useful skills—a distortion of history that the Legacy Museum exists to correct.

According to Stevenson, Montgomery, now a majority-Black city, was once the most prominent slave-trading center in America before the Civil War. What made it so, he explained, was the growing rail infrastructure connecting Alabama to markets across the South and Mid-Atlantic. From Montgomery, rail lines could carry enslaved people north through the Carolinas toward Richmond and Washington, D.C., at a fraction of the cost of marching them overland.

It also made kidnapping easy. Free Black people abducted from northern cities like Boston and New York were transported south by train, to be resold into slavery in Montgomery, where no one questioned them. Their anguish, Stevenson said, was made all the greater for believing they had finally reached freedom.

By 1860, Alabama’s enslaved population had swelled from forty thousand to four hundred thousand—a tenfold increase in just forty years. Yet for generations Montgomery refused to acknowledge that history. Interstate signs still point to the “First White House of the Confederacy,” and the state continues to honor the memories of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert E. Lee on the same holiday. Stevenson, who grew up in segregated Alabama schools, watched as white families fled to private academies when integration arrived. The city’s three largest public high schools—Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Sidney Lanier—remain nearly all Black. “This community, shaped by slavery and committed to it, never truly confronted that legacy,” Stevenson noted. “We have to challenge this. Nobody had talked about the domestic trade in Montgomery’s prominence—not even Southern historians.”

Stevenson’s observations about Montgomery’s silence echoed what I’d begun to sense in my own family’s record: how easily a history built on exploiting human lives can vanish from memory. One ancestor, Thomas Ford Spalding—my seventh-great-grandfather—arrived in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, as an indentured servant in 1657. After completing his term, he received a 100-acre grant from the Calvert family, Lords Baltimore, and settled along what is now McIntosh Run in present-day Leonardtown.

Over the following decades, Thomas assembled additional tracts—several hundred acres by the end of his life—and surviving records show that enslaved people lived and labored in his household, though the exact number remains unclear in the records I’ve seen. I wanted to walk that geography in reverse—on foot, on water, and in the archive—and see what the record, and the places themselves, might reveal.

Devin and I are the same age, born within months of one another. For years we’d each been doing genealogy, historical research, and ancestral healing work—separately, but along parallel tracks—and the trip to Montgomery grew naturally out of a conversation that had been building between us. We carried different questions there—his about how the legacies of slavery shape the present, mine about the antebellum fault lines in Maryland and Kentucky—but we shared a single aim: to know our stories, familial and national; to feel what the records could not say; and to learn what it means to hold that history responsibly.

We caught an early flight out of Bradley Airport in Hartford, connected through Atlanta, and landed in Montgomery before noon. We dropped our bags at a hotel downtown and walked to Pannie-George’s Kitchen inside the Legacy Museum for an early lunch—okra, black-eyed peas, chicken, mashed potatoes. Fortified with the comfort of soul food, we began the work of discovery.

Devin’s work in contemplative practice gave our visit a particular clarity. Years ago, with meditation teacher Noliwe Alexander, he co-founded Deep Time Liberation, a project exploring how ancestral legacy and historical trauma continue to shape the present. Their retreats—held in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and New Orleans—bring meditation into the very landscapes where harm occurred, so that grief, resilience, and history can be met rather than avoided. In person, Devin’s presence reflects that work—strong, grounded, and quietly warm, the kind of steadiness that draws people in.

It was Devin’s second time at the Legacy Sites. We agreed to move together when it helped and separately when we needed space, comparing notes at the end of each day like students after a difficult class.

After lunch, we officially entered the museum. You turn the first corner and meet not text but water—the room wrapped in floor-to-ceiling waves, the roar swelling until you feel inside it. It’s an immediate plunge into the Middle Passage. More than twelve million Africans were forced across the Atlantic between 1514 and 1866. Numbers stagger, but the next room makes them human: a corridor of sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s figures—shackled, blindfolded, torsos twisted. His series, Nkyinkyim (“life is a twisted journey”), is installed low so the gaze drops; humility built into the viewing. Men and women of every age. Terrified children. I move slowly, already scraped raw. And I’m only minutes in.

The museum sits on the site of a former slave warehouse. The past isn’t just a depiction. It’s an actual location. A recreated run of slave pens lines the corridor; as you approach each doorway, a sensor triggers a holographic figure who appears like a ghost and begins to speak. A woman tells you she can hear her children but cannot reach them. In the next cell, a man describes the auction block. I stop at each pen and listen, letting the stories layer until I feel their weight.

At the end of the row, two small figures appear, calling for their mother. The scene breaks me open. Tears rise, and I’m grateful the galleries are nearly empty. Standing there alone, I let the emotions surface, refusing to manage them.

A short film draws me into the human toll of the domestic slave trade. In a sunlit field with the plantation house behind them, a father, mother, and young daughter cling to one another in mounting terror as White enslavers walk toward them from the house. The father is to be “sold down the river.” Their sobs are shattering. A title card names the place: St. Mary’s County, Maryland. I had come to Montgomery hoping for exactly this collision—history that might touch my own line, where Thomas Ford Spalding settled in the seventeenth century. The landscape on the screen looked like the one I had stood in two years earlier: green, beautiful, alive with inherited memory and buried stories. The scene collapsed the distance between subject and viewer, making a stranger’s grief one with my own inheritance.

Back home I tried to learn where the film had been shot. Online notes pointed to Sotterley Plantation in St. Mary’s County; a historian there confirmed it. I called because I knew from an earlier trip to southern Maryland that my eighth-great-grandfather, Cuthbert Fenwick, had received a 2,000-acre grant there; a historical marker for Fenwick Manor stands on Jones Wharf Road, a couple of miles inland from Sotterley. The historian told me the Fenwick property sat just north of Sotterley on the Patuxent River.

Proximity snapped the film into focus: a neighboring shoreline.

In the colonial Chesapeake, water access and a working wharf made the domestic slave trade possible—the means by which people were moved, sold, and separated. I couldn’t say who the white men in the scene were, but I now knew the camera was pointed at a landscape my family once claimed.

By early evening, the museum’s soundscape—water, voices, footsteps, the tolling of names—had settled inside me like a lead weight. Outside, the air hit like a wall, thick, hot, hammering.

That night, Devin and I ate at Ravello, an Italian restaurant on Commerce Street set in a former bank. We sat on the mezzanine, looking down over white tablecloths and the ghosts of old marble teller windows. The owners call it “The Great Gatsby meets the Amalfi Coast,” and for a moment it felt like that—crystal light, soft jazz, a different century.

Settled into high-back chairs—formal enough for the room, soft enough to sink into—we toasted the day with the house Old Fashioned, smoke and citrus curling up from the ice. Through the linen and glass of the dining room, I couldn’t stop thinking about what “commerce” had once meant here. People marched up from the river to be sold in the square above. The dining room’s hush sounded like money; outside, history still echoed on the street.

We talked quietly over shared appetizers and a plate of seafood pasta. “I want to sit longer with the throughline,” Devin said—the rooms that carry the thread from lynching to policing to prisons. He talked about his parents: his mother, born in the early 1940s in Mississippi, carrying the hypervigilance of a sharecropping world; his father’s carefulness around police—not a quirk of temperament, but a survival strategy.

Meanwhile, I was still back in the antebellum fault lines in Maryland and Kentucky. Devin called it practice: staying with what hurts without hardening into rage or denial. “If we won’t feel it,” he said, “we’ll repeat it.”

We compared notes the way runners cool down—breath ragged at first, then easing. Devin smiled. “Different doors, same house.” For a moment we let the silence settle between us.

We met the next morning in the hotel lobby and set out before nine, knowing the second day would be hotter and mostly outdoors—the memorial, the sculpture park, then a final hour back at the museum. After a day in Montgomery, the map of downtown made sense. Our hotel sat on Commerce Street, a block and a half from the river. We followed it past Ravello, up to Court Square and its fountain—just under a half-mile. It’s the route enslaved people were forced to walk in shackles from the riverfront and the rail depot to the slave depots and markets clustered around the square.

Two markers helped read the street. An EJI plaque on Commerce Street notes that the Montgomery probate office granted at least 164 licenses to slave traders from 1848 to 1860, and that Commerce and Market Street (now Dexter Avenue) held most of the traders’ offices. Nearby, an older sign—installed by local groups in 2001—describes the central market at the fountain, where “slaves of all ages” were auctioned with posted notices listing gender, approximate age, first name, skills, complexion, owner’s name, and price; in the 1850s, able field hands might bring $1,500 and skilled artisans $3,000. Standing between the plaques, the differences are stark. The state-style signs use the word “slaves” and carry the Alabama flag crest; EJI’s markers say “enslaved people” and bear the Black Heritage Council’s emblem—Africa over Alabama in red, gold, and green.

When Bryan Stevenson arrived in Montgomery in 1989, he liked to say he found a city thick with tributes to the Confederacy—dozens of monuments, streets, and schools named for its leaders—and not a single public marker acknowledging slavery or the trade. That imbalance is part of what EJI set out to change: to put names and facts on the landscape where the violation of humanity occurred.

We paused beside the Court Square Fountain—a tiered cast-iron confection from 1885 crowned by Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth—its prettiness an ironic contrast with the square’s slave market past. We crossed to the statue of Rosa Parks at the bus stop where she waited on the day that rerouted history. I snapped Devin’s photo beside her—two witnesses standing at the junction of inequality and injustice.

From there we walked up Dexter Avenue toward the state Capitol, hoping to see what we could before the heat turned oppressive. We stopped at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor and helped plan the bus boycott. The state Capitol sits diagonally across the street. The proximity still stuns—the small brick church facing the vast white dome. It was a potent reminder of the peril those organizers lived with and the courage it took to stand up to that bastion of White power.

It made me reflect on what’s remembered in public spaces like this—and what’s forgotten at home. In families it can begin as self-protection: skip the parts that hurt. It hardens into denial. In my father’s line, the truth is plain: the people I come from measured human worth by color and caste, and often reached for religion to bless the falsehood.

In the Old South, preachers sanctified slavery as God’s design while scientists ranked people by bone and brain. This is not an indictment of faith; my Catholic kin, like their Protestant neighbors, prayed and farmed and baptized their children. But belief conscripted to protect advantage can sanctify almost anything, including the pain slavery inflicted.

Stevenson has argued that the deeper evil of slavery wasn’t only the bondage itself, but the narrative constructed to justify it—the insistence that Black people were less human, less capable, less deserving of freedom. The Civil War ended enslavement, he has written, but it didn’t end that narrative. What the Legacy Sites insist on, against considerable resistance, is that the only remedy for a false story is a true one.

That argument is made not in words but in the architecture of these places—in the holographic figures in the slave pens, in the suspended corten-steel monuments, in the wall of names at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.

You don’t read the argument. You walk through it.

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The memorial Devin and I were about to visit was built to do exactly that.

If downtown Montgomery teaches how a city arranged its commerce, the memorial on the hill teaches the cost of that commerce—a counterweight to the city’s curated memory.

After time in the heat and history, we made our way back to the Legacy Museum, where we caught the shuttle to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a little over a mile away. The memorial sits on six landscaped acres high above Montgomery, looking out over downtown and the Capitol. It’s a beautiful, haunting place that uses sculpture, prose, and poetry—from Toni Morrison and Elizabeth Alexander to Martin Luther King Jr.—and architecture to make visible racial terror. The site is designed to guide visitors from slavery to lynching and Jim Crow, through the civil-rights era into the present.

At the summit stands a roofed structure holding more than 800 six-foot corten-steel monuments—rusted, coffinlike forms suspended from the ceiling—each representing a U.S. county where a racial-terror lynching took place. Many are engraved with a dozen or more names and dates.

Devin began tracing his own map through the hangings. His mother’s family came from Claiborne County, Mississippi, where his ancestor Ned Wilson escaped enslavement and joined the Union Army. The Wilsons stayed there after the war, among the cotton fields of Port Gibson and Vicksburg—places that later became sites of terror. His father’s people were from Red River County, Texas, another landscape marked by silence, where at least two dozen Black men were lynched between 1877 and 1950, most unmentioned in local papers. And in Oklahoma, where his family migrated in the early 1900s, he carried the story of Laura and L.D. Nelson—a mother and teenage son dragged from a jail and hanged from a railroad bridge in 1911, their photographs sold as postcards.

He paused at the Red River County slab and told me about his father teaching him how to talk to police—what to do with his hands, where to stand, how to make fear look like calm. “Less personality than survival,” he said, seeing now how their habits were learned responses. In the next aisle he pointed to Claiborne County and the cotton towns his mother left behind, and I could suddenly hear her vigilance in his voice.

Listening to Devin, the scale of history narrowed: an abstract ledger giving way to the contour of a friend’s lineage, lives cut short but still felt generations later. I thought of my own ancestors in Marion County, Kentucky—a state that, along with Delaware and Mississippi, refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. My father’s forebears farmed there, men whose names I now encountered beside the names, and the silences, of the people they enslaved. I walked the memorial looking for Kentucky.

The design deepens as you move. You enter with the monuments at eye level; in the next gallery, set on a gentle decline, they rise overhead. The change is simple and exacting: you are forced to look up. I kept scanning for Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana. Down one long run I found row after row of Kentucky counties—nearly fifty in view. After thirty minutes of craning, my neck ached. I sat, rubbed the muscles, and realized the ache was part of the teaching. The memorial asks the body to bear a fraction of what the mind would rather avoid.

Then I found it: Marion County. Two names and a date—Benjamin McElroy and Pinten Young, February 19, 1884. I wondered if anyone in my family had known about them. Back home, I searched newspapers from that year. Local papers were quiet, but I did find a New York Times account: the men, accused of assaulting a woman named Susan Gibbin, were seized from the jail in Lebanon by a mob of more than fifty enraged citizens who broke down the doors with sledgehammers. Protesting their innocence, McElroy and Young were taken to the railroad turntable and hanged from a horizontal bar. “Only a few of the mob were masked,” the Times noted. “Spectators mingled freely with the participants without objections.”

We left the Memorial for Peace and Justice, shuttled back to the Legacy Museum, then took another shuttle to the river. From there, we boarded a boat for the short, fifteen-minute ride down the Alabama to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, built on the grounds of a former plantation.

This was the river—the artery of the domestic slave trade. After the transatlantic trade was outlawed in 1808, more than one million enslaved people were forced from the Upper South to the Deep South; many were shipped by steamboat up the Alabama from Mobile to Montgomery, where warehouses along Commerce Street fed auctions in Court Square. By 1860, cotton had made Montgomery one of the South’s busiest slave markets—part of an economy already built on over twelve million Africans transported across the Atlantic, with roughly two million dying in the Middle Passage.

A winding path leads through woods and open clearings, past sculptures and historical installations. Along the way, a cadence of small dark-blue markers, spaced close together, offers clipped facts from the slave trade—one after another until they accumulate like footsteps. One in particular stopped me: “St. Mary’s County, Maryland, 1692—9 People Trafficked from Africa.”

About halfway through the park, you come to a wooden rail car. Stepping inside, you learn that enslaved people were often chained together in groups of twenty or more in 24- to 30-foot cars—a confined, airless geometry that still holds the terror of centuries past. Two 170-year-old structures from Faunsdale Plantation stand nearby, their rooms holding a hush that feels like breath held for generations. Farther on, Daniel Popper’s Hallow rises from the earth—an immense sculpture of an enslaved woman, her chest parted open. Her hands draw the two sides of her torso apart, creating a doorway through her heart. The only way forward is through that opening. Up close, it feels alive. Just before the loop ends, Nikesha Breeze’s 108 Death Masks gathers the faces of the uncounted into a wall of silent, uncompromising witness.

And then, at last, we reached the orange wall.

Devin had found his name—Berry—and we used the app to locate mine.

Spalding.

We stood there until the heat moved us on.

Later, when we reflected on our trip, Devin said, “What stands out most for me from our visit was that wall. Seeing my family name there just really hit me. And when I saw yours too, it all came together—our names, and the two of us standing there together.”

He paused. “You know, it wasn’t that long ago that you and I might never even have crossed paths. Or if we had, we probably wouldn’t have looked at each other, let alone spoken. And yet here we were, standing in that place of remembering, holding the truth together.”

He went on to describe how his parents, both born in the 1940s in Mississippi and Kansas, grew up in worlds so segregated that Black and White people rarely met each other’s eyes. His mother learned not to look at White people at all, for safety; his father didn’t meet one until he went to college in Wichita, where he played football with White teammates for the first time. “When my brother and I were kids,” Devin said, “my parents were nervous any time we went somewhere, because they’d seen what could happen. They couldn’t believe I had White friends. It was almost inconceivable.”

“There are a lot of Black people and White people I couldn’t do that trip with,” Devin said. “Some Black people would crumble in there; it’s just too much. And some White people would be paralyzed by guilt and shame. But you and I could do it because we’ve done the ancestry work, because we’ve studied the history, and because of the years of meditation practice—we’ve learned to stay with what’s painful without hardening or turning away. We can allow the truth in and just be with it. I’ve told some of my White friends, ‘You didn’t do what your ancestors did. That’s not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to recognize and honor the history.’”

I thought about the world Devin’s parents had lived in and the one we were standing in now—how, in a single lifetime, the distance between those worlds had narrowed just enough for the two of us to meet in friendship. What came to mind was the image of us standing together on the steps of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, just across from the State Capitol. It was there that King and the early leaders of the Civil Rights Movement gathered to begin the work that made such a difference between the world Devin’s parents knew and the one that raised us. It is their courage, and the generations who carried it forward, that made that day possible.

We returned to the museum for a final hour. The crowds had thinned. The light was softer, as if the building, like us, had grown quieter. On the flight home I kept seeing that orange-glowing surname. Which formerly enslaved people had once been made to carry it? I wanted to find out, to put first names to the last names, even to link a post-Thirteenth Amendment life story to one of them.

Once home, I went back into my Ancestry.com family tree. Under John B. Spalding’s records, his 1850 and 1860 Federal Slave Schedules, the enslaved were still nameless—age, sex, color—and yet the wall had changed what felt possible.

The first voice that spoke to me was not my great-great-grandfather’s, but my fourth-great-grandfather Francis Buckman’s: an 1814 estate inventory that listed six enslaved people by name, each followed by a dollar value—Nancy, age thirty, $375; Sary, twenty-four, $400; Joseph, nine, $275; Henry, two, $150. The neat columns were chilling—lives reduced to sums in ink—and yet the names themselves cut through the dehumanizing fog.

I searched the online database of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, and found only one relevant item: a bill of sale, dated January 10, 1854, of an enslaved person—in Marion County, Kentucky. The chances felt slim that that one record would connect to my ancestors, but I wondered.

I emailed Filson immediately. The following day, I received a response from a collections specialist. “The collection you’re asking about is just one folder, so I went ahead and scanned it in its entirety. See the attached PDF!”

I went right for the 1854 bill of sale, and immediately recognized one of the names, the seller: John G. Mattingly—my second cousin, four times removed—a successful bourbon distiller. This hand-written document transferred an enslaved man named Ben, “supposed to be fifty years of age,” to Folk (Polk) Russell, a nearby neighbor. Mattingly warranted Ben as a “slave for life,” confirming this with his signature. A typed note attached by the repository adds that Ben was later said to have lived to about 100 years old.

John B. Spalding and John G. Mattingly knew each other well. Nineteenth-century Kentucky newspapers report both men as Marion County delegates at the 1860 Democratic convention, backing then–Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Lexington, whose Southern Democratic ticket ran on a pro-slavery platform pledging federal protection of slaveholders’ rights.

I wrote back to the Filson Historical Society, asking if anything in their database—a painstaking index of slavery-era records—might connect specifically to John B. Spalding. A spreadsheet arrived: rows of transactions, notes, and cross-references. Halfway down the page were the names of three enslaved men listed under my great-great-grandfather’s name, names that would not have appeared in John B.’s census entries:

Logan Spalding. James Spalding. Nace Spalding.

The record didn’t provide much information, but I was grateful for any detail. All three men were born in Kentucky, James in 1842, Nace in 1847. There wasn’t a birth year listed for Logan, but the record indicated that he was Catholic, recording that he married an enslaved woman, Isabelle Hayden, on June 14, 1862, at the Holy Name of Mary Church, in Calvary, Kentucky, a small church where dozens of my ancestors were baptized, married, and buried. For James and Nace, the entry noted that they enlisted in the Federal Army’s 125th Infantry USCT (U.S. Colored Troops) on March 27, 1865.

This presented me with a puzzle. If my great-great-grandfather was an enslaver who supported the Confederacy, how did two enslaved men under his name wind up enlisting in the Union Army? Did John B. give them a celebratory send-off, wishing them good health and good fortune? Or, sensing the war’s end nearing, did he sell the men to the Federal Army? I’d read that just as men in the North could get out of the draft by paying $300—the opportunity my great-great-grandfather Charles Peirce passed on—some Southern enslavers sold enslaved men to the Union Army for the same amount.

I did more sleuthing through old newspapers and records on Ancestry.com. And then I found it—a 1923 obituary for James Spalding, with a contemporary note attached saying that James had been “formerly enslaved by John B. Spaulding” (with a “u” added, as is often the case for me still today). The newspaper noted that James joined the 125th U.S. Colored Infantry, enlisting “without his master’s consent.” After the war, James moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he lived for more than forty-five years and was “always a leader and always popular among the local colored people—and respected by the white people,” according to the Bloomington Daily Telephone.

The obituary referred to James by a nickname—“Massa Spalding.” I flinched. The term carries so much weight, yet here it was used with affection, attached to a man respected in his community. Part of me wonders whether he embraced the name himself—as a quiet reversal of the old order, rather than a lingering trace of bondage under my ancestor. Perhaps in his freedom he became master of his life. I’ll never know for certain, but the possibility feels right.

Since then, I’ve been tracing those lives as best I can, following the faint ink of archives into the living world. You end at the wall, but it doesn’t end there. It continues with names you can say out loud.

It doesn’t matter where our ancestors lived—North or South, free state or slave state. Slavery is part of our collective story. By the nineteenth century, the cotton economy powered the world, enriching not only the plantations of the Deep South but also textile mills, insurers, and banks of the North. The web ran from Alabama’s fields to Boston’s counting houses, from Charleston’s wharves to Connecticut’s shipyards.

Even the town where I now live, Middletown, was built in part on that foundation. By the mid-1700s it was Connecticut’s largest city, with more than two hundred enslaved people and two active slave dealers downtown. In 2019 a UNESCO Slave Route plaque was installed along the riverfront, acknowledging two documented arrivals of enslaved Africans—126 people on the Martha & Jane in 1738 and seventy-four on the Speedwell in 1761. The plaque stands by the water. None of us are as far from this history as we might wish to believe.

Devin called it practice: staying with the pain. In a time of curated amnesia, remembering names, places, causes, and consequences isn’t merely a personal act of penance and respect. It’s public work.

As Devin and I left for the airport at the end of our journey—Montgomery thinning out, the Alabama River flashing through the trees—I thought of how my ancestors’ names once conferred ownership, and how the names on that wall have reclaimed, at last, their own identities. What began as a search for history became something else: a reckoning with a past that is also mine.

Devin came from a lineage of survival; I came from one of forgetting. Yet we both inherited the residue of harm. His comes from a history of terror that still warns. Mine from habits of distancing and denial that still shield.

I am not my ancestors. And yet, if I do not bear witness to their sins, how can I honor their victims? If I do not admit my part in the forgetting, how can I take part in the remembering?

As Devin said, “If we won’t feel, we’ll repeat it.”

Logan. James. Nace. I’m still learning to say their names out loud.

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John D. Spalding is a writer and the director of partnerships and communications at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. He is the author of A Pilgrim’s Digress: My Perilous, Fumbling Quest for the Celestial City (Harmony Books) and was a contributing editor at The Week and a longtime columnist for Beliefnet. His essays, criticism, and reporting have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Commonweal, The Christian Century, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Revealer, Killing the Buddha, and the anthology The Best Christian Writing.