Tell us about yourself and the book you selected.
I am a 40-year employee of Colonial Williamsburg. I have been an Actor-Interpreter for the last 18 years. I chose Heather Andrea Williams’s Help Me To Find My People: The African-American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012).
Why is this book meaningful to you?
It shows the many ways that enslaved people were separated during their bondage. Sadly, this was a fact of life for every enslaved person at one time or another. And it shows the resilience of enslaved people to maintain those family ties as best they could against often insurmountable odds.
What is your favorite quote from or detail about this book?
Williams speaks about the loss of family members enslaved people experienced through separation and introduces the concept of “ambiguous loss”: “Of all the losses experienced in personal relationships, ambiguous loss is the most devastating because it remains unclear, indeterminate . . .”
Why should others read this book?
Guests are often aware that enslaved men, women, and children rarely lived together in family groups. But they don’t often think about how people separated from their loved ones carried on with their lives amidst the heartbreak and tried to maintain contact or keep up with their relatives.