“What I appreciate most in this document are my grandmother’s inked corrections of the misspelled name of the family who enslaved ours.”

My grandmother was a secret archivist. When we cleaned out her home after she died, we found neatly organized records of her life. Among stacks of newspaper articles of nearly every milestone in my father’s life and pay stubs from her days as a schoolteacher on a barrier island near Georgetown, South Carolina (we had no idea she worked as a teacher because she only had a middle school education), was an obituary of her uncle, Phineas Singleton.