"OH, MY GOD! HE WAS A SLAVE!"

Secrets of a Virginia Courthouse Archive

Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield

COME CLOSE, LET ME TELL YOU A STORY

I sat at an old wooden table with Will Book 12 in my hands and parted the tattered pages of the 200-year-old book. As my eyes slowly crept over the exquisite scribble, I saw it.

I had visited the Halifax County Courthouse in Virginia numerous times and read Will Book 12. My investigations into the past had not revealed official evidence of Friday Faulkner's existence. However, on January 17, 2002, I saw his name. I saw "Friday" on the last page of the four-page legal document dated February 9, 1823. Was this serendipity?

I read the line over and over: "with sundry negroes namely Friday ... with sundry negroes namely Friday ... with sundry negroes namely Friday ..." (J. Faulkner 685).

"Oh, my God! He was a slave!" I whispered dishearteningly to myself. My heart dropped to my feet; my blood boiled and heated my entire body; my throat filled with a warm, acidic substance; my tear ducts flooded. Pain penetrated every layer of my skin and tore at my organs. I was paralyzed. I was speechless. Although my intellect and curiosity had commanded ancestral knowledge, my psyche and physique did not welcome the conversion they experienced on that fateful day in the archive of the Halifax County Courthouse.

For six years I had conducted archival and historical research in Virginia, in North Carolina, and on the internet with the mission of unearthing ancestral knowledge, specifically knowledge on my great-great-grandparents, Friday and Rebecca Harris Faulkner. Although their own words went unspoken, each year my extended family and I celebrated their lives and the legacy they germinated for us. The oral history that circulated within and outside my family did not include a slave named Friday Faulkner. Hence, while analyzing the rhetoric of slavery, I posed one question: "Is this the lesson I was destined to learn?" Not only had I unearthed my great-great-grandfather, I had also discerned his role in the development of America and thus of American history. Friday Faulkner was a major character in one of the worst chapters in American history, which reads accordingly: I give to my son Obadiah Faulkner the land and plantation whereon he now lives in Person County, N Carolina with sundry negroes namely Friday and Malinda with all the stock on the plantation with my surveyors [sic] instruments to him and his heirs forever (J. Faulkner 685).

I held Friday in my hands — a life that had been placed on an eleven by seventeen piece of parchment among animals and other commodities; a life that had been directed by a white man who believed people of African descent were unworthy of autonomy, respect, and value as human beings. Reading Jacob's will overwhelmed me because I was uninformed about Friday's past, because I refused to make assumptions about Friday's life, and because I had discovered that my maternal great-great-great-grandfather and his brother were born free.

This is another story:

In October 1999, I visited the Halifax County Courthouse and searched the Register of Free Negroes for any Faulkner. Instead, I found the names "Henderson Lester" and "Elisha Lester" and learned that both of them were born free, a status that was indicative of their mother's status — a free woman: a free black woman? A free white woman? Later, I learned that Henderson Lester was my great-great-great-grandfather, my paternal great-grandmother's father. On November 27, 1848, both Henderson and Elisha A. Lester registered as freemen of color in Halifax County, Virginia (Register of Free Blacks in Halifax County, no. 404 and no. 405). Henderson was twenty-seven years old, and Elisha was twenty-six years old.Though I learned that these black males of dark complexion with curly black hair were born free, their embodied representation of "free" men was unsettling because my ancestors bore the marks of slavery: Elisha "has a scar on his left thumb," and Henderson "had a scar on his left fore finger [and] the same finger had been cut off" (Register). Was the slave-free paradox a false binary for Henderson and Elisha Lester? Given that after the year 1640 skin tone was the primary factor that distinguished a free human being from an enslaved human being, the writer's emphasis on physicality was imperative to my ancestors' status and survival as "free" persons of color in a slaveholding society. Furthermore, according to the 1850 United States Census, 534 "free colored Persons" resided in Halifax County, Virginia. Among a total slave population of 14,452, my maternal ancestors were among the 3.7 percent of free people of color in Halifax County.

After reading Jacob's narrative, I internalized my emotions...