For Reggie
Dedicated to Reggie Britton, who carried these women's names when the world forgot them.
There are names in this house that do not appear in any courthouse ledger, any census column, any deed of sale with a proper heading. No birth date. No death date. No last name anyone was allowed to give them. They exist only because somebody's granddaughter remembered. Because a family kept talking when the country stopped listening. Because a woman named Reggie Britton sat down and wrote what her people carried, and brought it into this house where we believe that every branch matters.
Reggie is the reason we know any of this. And this post belongs to her.
Ida.
We do not know when she was born. We do not know when she died. We do not know where she came from before Phillip Durell claimed her as his property in Virginia. What we know is this. In 1817, when Phillip Durell's daughter Cordelia married a minister named Daniel Davis in Charlottesville, Ida and her children were given to the new bride as a wedding present.
A wedding present.
That is not a figure of speech. That is not a metaphor. That is the legal, documented, socially accepted practice of handing a human being and her children to another human being the way you would hand over a piece of furniture or a plot of land. Virginia law in 1817 made that not only possible but routine. The 1662 Hereditary Slave Law had settled the question generations earlier — the status of a child followed the status of the mother. If Ida was property, everything she ever brought into the world was property too. That was the law. That was Virginia. That was the world Ida lived in and survived in and raised her children inside of.
Cordelia died young. What happened to Ida after that we do not know. Her fate is a blank page. She disappears from the record the way enslaved women always disappeared from the record — not because she stopped existing but because the system that surrounded her had no mechanism for preserving the existence of a Black woman who was not being transferred, sold, or inventoried.
Ida. Enslaved by Phillip Durell. Charlottesville, Virginia. 1817. Fate unknown.
That is all we have. And it is enough to say her name.
Rose.
Ida's daughter. Sold outside the family at the age of fourteen. Fourteen years old. Separated from her mother, separated from her sister, handed to strangers for a price we will never know, sent somewhere the family could not follow. Rose vanishes from the record at fourteen and does not come back. We do not know where she went. We do not know what happened to her. We know only that she existed, that she was Ida's child, and that she was taken.
Rose. Sold at fourteen. Charlottesville, Virginia. Circa 1817. Destination unknown.
Eliza.
Ida's other daughter. When Cordelia's widower Daniel Davis — the minister who had received these women as a wedding gift — eventually made a different choice, he freed Eliza. We do not know what moved him. Grief over his wife. Conscience. Faith. Something shifted in that man and he used whatever legal power he had to free one of the women in his household. Eliza stayed with the Davis family after her freedom came. She stayed until she was ready to leave on her own terms, until she married Reggie's third great-grandfather and built a life that carried forward into the present day.
Eliza is why Reggie exists. Eliza is why we know any of this. Eliza carried Ida's memory forward because she survived long enough to pass it down.
Eliza. Freed by Daniel Davis. Charlottesville, Virginia. Married into Reggie's line. The one who remembered.
Polly.
Reggie's fourth great-grandmother on another line. Enslaved by Jacob Cohen and Isaiah Isaacs — Jewish merchants in Richmond and Charlottesville, well documented in Virginia's historical record. Isaiah Isaacs died in 1806 and in his will he freed Polly. That is a documented Virginia deed of manumission. It exists. It is real. Polly walked out of bondage on paper the day Isaiah Isaacs died.
And then the world found another way to use her.
Even as a free woman she was rented out. Hired to a man named John Garner when she was around twenty years old. She had two children during that time. She named them Garner. She took that name herself. Because that was what she had. That was the only name available to her children in a world that still did not fully recognize her freedom as something that protected her from being used.
Think about that choice. Polly named her children after the man she was rented to because she was building the only identity available to her out of the only materials she had. That is not weakness. That is a woman doing everything in her power to give her children something to hold onto.
She was still living with the Garner family in 1850. Free, but not free in every way that mattered. Her son John eventually gathered his family and left for Philadelphia in 1853. He fought on the Union side when the war came. He carried himself and his children out of Virginia and into a different future.
Polly did not go with them.
We do not know why. We do not know if she could not travel, would not leave, was too old, was too tired, or simply could not bring herself to walk away from the ground where Lucy was buried. We only know she stayed.
Polly. Freed by Isaiah Isaacs, 1806. Rented to John Garner. Virginia. Still there as of 1850. Fate after that unknown.
Lucy.
Polly's mother. That is almost everything we know. Lucy was enslaved alongside her daughter by Jacob Cohen and Isaiah Isaacs. She appears in the record as Polly's mother and then she disappears. No freedom date. No death date. No destination. No story that survived the silence.
Reggie said it plainly. Lucy's story is a mystery.
That sentence is one of the most honest things anyone has ever written in this house. Because that is the truth of so much of this work. We chase the names and sometimes the names lead somewhere and sometimes they lead to a woman named Lucy who existed, who mattered, who raised a daughter who raised a son who eventually carried the family's freedom north on his back — and we cannot find her. We can only say that she was there. That she was real. That Polly came from somewhere and that somewhere was Lucy.
Lucy. Enslaved by Jacob Cohen and Isaiah Isaacs. Virginia. Mother of Polly. Everything else unknown.
These five women lived and died in Virginia. Some of them died free. Some of them we will never find. All of them were real. All of them mattered. All of them belong in this house alongside every planter, every Native grandmother, every indentured servant, every Huguenot refugee we have ever named here.
This is what the Slave Owners Project is for. Not just the names of the men who held the deeds. The names of the people the deeds were written about. The women who were given as wedding presents. The daughters who were sold at fourteen. The mothers who stayed behind when their children finally got free. The grandmothers who are nothing but a mystery and a name.
Ida. Rose. Eliza. Polly. Lucy.
They were here. They were Virginia. They belong in this house.
All the roots. All the stories. Every single one.
Share what you know, say what you will, listen to what you might learn, and make yourself at home.
Receipts over speculation. Always.
Stephen L. Tankesley-Kennedy Jr. "Nettopaw" 17th Generation Virginian Society of the Founding Families of Virginia 1607–1850— with Reggie Britton.
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