In celebration of this year’s Southern Festival of Books—taking place in downtown Nashville on Saturday, October 26, and Sunday, October 27—we welcome a guest post from Andrew C. Ross, author of The Realms of Oblivion: An Excavation of the Davies Manor Historic Site’s Omitted Stories. Festival attendees can hear Ross talk about his book this Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Tennessee State Library & Archives (Obion Room). For more information about the festival, visit our Southern Festival of Books virtual exhibit.
A handful of promissory notes about enslaved people being “hired” out. Three bills of sale, one ripped in half, detailing purchases of men, women, and children. And twelve yellowed ledger pages recording the first names and birthdates of fifty-eight souls born into bondage between 1792 and 1860. Such were the core documents I encountered the first time I opened the folder labeled “slave records” in the Davies Manor’s Association’s archives. This was early 2017, shortly after I’d taken a job with this small plantation museum and historic site near Memphis, but well before any of the research I was doing would evolve in the direction of a book. Initially, the goal was to work toward an exhibit and tour scripts exploring the site’s omitted history of slavery—a long overdue project, to put it mildly.
Through the ensuing months, as I and a few volunteers dove into the full archives with fresh eyes, I found myself going through plenty of ups and downs as I got a better handle on the dichotomous nature of this one collection of plantation papers. For starters, the collection had been “catalogued” only in the loosest sense of the word. Beyond the “slave records” folder, clues and relevant materials were scattered throughout dozens of other folders and boxes. There were additional promissory notes and reams of untranscribed letters. There were post–Civil War commissary ledgers, cotton factor receipts, coffin receipts, and miscellaneous ephemera. I found a final will that listed enslaved people by name, scraps of probate records that did the same, and fragments of uncontextualized legal depositions—all of which pointed toward a host of new research possibilities in outside repositories.
On the one hand, this data offered a prime opportunity to break past the “1870 Brick Wall,” as researchers of African American genealogy call the point in time when Black people were enumerated for the first time in federal census records. On the other hand, it was fragmentary in the extreme. Furthermore, I knew, these centuries-old pages penned by enslavers were fraught, entirely one-sided, wholly inadequate. For all the precious information they held, they also constituted a grotesquely distorted record of what had actually occurred as multiple generations of the Davies family built their lives and livelihoods upon the exploitation and dehumanization of generations of Black families.
The main challenges then, in this first phase of the project, came down to connecting dots, cross-referencing, transcribing, and reading between lines. As much as anything it became a matter of sitting with these records over and over and over, returning to them again and again. Each time I reentered, it seemed, I saw something new. Yet each time I returned I also fought back doubts about how a paper trail so haphazard and problematic could be stitched together into coherent and impactful narratives. Adding to my concerns, I remained keenly aware that the organization, for a variety of complex reasons, had barely scratched the surface when it came to identifying and establishing meaningful contact with descendants of the community the Davies had once enslaved. Was I really up to this work? I so often wondered. Would it ever be possible to do right by this story?
Around this same time, I learned something new that helped give my frustrations and self-doubt more perspective. The DMA’s archives, it turned out, had very nearly been destroyed altogether. For a good chunk of the twentieth century, most of the papers had sat in a large trunk beneath a stairwell in the log-house museum. In the absence of proper storage and climate control, time took its toll. Then, in 1994, following the death of Davies Manor’s founder, Ellen Davies-Rodgers, the trunk was inexplicably marked for the dumpster. That fate had only been avoided when the site’s longtime groundskeeper took it upon himself to salvage the trunk. “I said, ‘Oh my God,’” the groundskeeper, Randall Langston, would later recall in an oral history he recorded with the museum. “Half of it was ate completely up with silverfish and brown recluse spiders everywhere. I went through it the best I could. . . . It was important stuff.” The physical neglect of the DMA’s most valuable evidentiary assets, I realized, had mirrored the omissions, obfuscations, and outright neglect of the institution’s most fundamental story. Rather than face the difficult work of truth-telling and self-analysis, Davies-Rodgers and others had quite literally kept the story in the dark. Said another way—and here I’m borrowing from the historian James W. Loewen—Davies Manor had simply failed to take its own “history seriously enough to bother to tell it like it was.”
Looking back now on the early stretch of research, I know that at the most basic level I was just trying to take something seriously in a way that others before me had not. This feeling would become further amplified in the years to come as the project brought me into contact with a wide range of outside source material. In Lunenburg County, Virginia, where Davies-Rodgers’s ancestors had gotten their start in America, I found a litany of important information in the dusty pages of oversized fiduciary books. Here, to give just one example, I saw definitive proof that a woman I’d been following named Dolly had indeed been “the mother and grandmother of all the others.” In Maury County, Tennessee, barely legible court records contained the sordid details of estate disputes and family feuds that revolved around bondspeople. In Fayette County, visits to the library’s local history room led to a discussion with the ninety-five-year-old County Historian who cleared up my confusion about matters of historic geography. Back in Shelby County, I found nuggets of critical data in probate and quarterly court loose papers; in an eclectic collection of community history compiled by a church historian; and through painstakingly combing microfilmed Memphis newspapers that had yet to be digitized.
I recount all this only to emphasize a closing point: If nothing else, I hope that The Realms of Oblivion can convey to readers the enormous research possibilities that exist in the most obscure, ground-level repositories of the past like the ones that undergirded this project. These often-overlooked places, I believe, hold the keys to begin unlocking so many important stories and lost family histories. As is the case with the rest of America’s larger archival record, such materials are of course rife with limitations and inherent biases. Their “unnervingly silent gaps” speak as loudly as what they actually contain. But they also deserve to be taken seriously, to be returned to over and over again—to be taken out into the light and built upon with new reimagining, by new generations hungry for new frameworks of understanding.
