I Couldn't Unlearn the Name of My Great-Great-Grandfather's Enslaved Person — And I Didn't Want To

My great-great-grandfather A.J. Pickett owned two cotton plantations in Alabama. He was an historian and an apologist for slavery. He wrote that the South’s steamy climate was so destructive of the constitutions of whites that the land could never be successfully cultivated without African labor. He despised abolitionists, and, in one pamphlet, defended the South’s system of what he called “mild domestic slavery.”  

As my great-great-grandfather’s words illustrate, America was built on the backs of enslaved Africans. The debt keeps compounding and can never be repaid. For those of us descended from enslavers, learning of this disturbing history can be personal and direct.

One day I opened my silverware drawer and noticed a familiar silver serving spoon that had been handed down in my family. For the first time it occurred to me to investigate the name engraved on the handle, L.P. Walker. All it took was a simple Internet search.  LeRoy Pope Walker, I discovered, was the first secretary of War of the Confederate States of America and the husband of one of my ancestral cousins, named Eliza. Along with that knowledge came the realization that the spoon had surely been polished by slaves.

Later, I would come to know about a kidnapping — of a Black 2-year-old child named Milton. Through Milton’s great-granddaughter, family historian Karen Orozco Gutierrez, I learned that he and his family were victims of what has been called the Reverse Underground Railroad. In the decades before the Civil War, traffickers and slave traders abducted thousands of free African Americans in the North and sold them “down the river” into slavery. That is how Milton, born free in Davenport, Iowa, spent most of his childhood enslaved on my great-great-grandfather’s plantation in Alabama. 

Editor's Note: Read more of Ann Banks' writing on her personal reckoning with the legacy of slavery on Ann Banks' Confederates in My Closet blog on HNN.