Heather Bollinger manages the historic records at the Fairfax court. With the assistant archivist Georgia Brown, she maintains the Fairfax Court Slavery Index, a detailed collection of more than 40,000 references to slaves in wills, deeds, bills of sale and probate records. Slave auctions were once held just outside the building.
“The people in these records are alive for us,” Ms. Bollinger said. “We talk about them. We gossip about them. We think about them.”
Last August, the two met with Ms. Finger, Ms. Brooks and some of their relatives. They presented each family member a packet of documents, many of them chancery court cases, that opened a window into the story of Charles Ratcliffe and Ann.
A narrative began to take shape. The documents showed that until February 1854, Ann and her children were the legal property of Charles’s grandfather. When he died, his slaves were divided among his heirs. One of Charles’s cousins drew the lot that included Ann and her children.
But that cousin soon ran up debts buying copious quantities of whiskey. To pay his debts, he asked a slave trader to sell the slaves. He eventually wound up in court, fighting over their value and ownership.
He complained that while he was legally entitled to Ann and the children, Charles was living with them. He feared Charles would run off with Ann, “it being notorious that she lived in a state of concubinage with Charles W. Ratcliffe,” according to a slave trader’s testimony. So the trader sold Ann to another slave trader.
Charles’s mother then stepped in. While never declaring herself the children’s grandmother, she told the new owner that Ann and her three children were “of the family” and said she wanted to buy them back, a trader testified. She borrowed money to buy Ann and the youngest two children, but refused to buy the oldest child, 6-year-old Maria, saying she was unsure about her paternity.
Interrupting the narrative, Ms. Bollinger said she had unearthed a photo of the slave trader. Did the family want to see it?
Ms. Finger said no, and passed it to Ms. Brooks. “I don’t want to see him,” she said. She was angry that Charles’s mother had refused to buy Maria.
But Ms. Brooks studied the image. The trader was looking away from the camera. He wore a black hat and an ill-fitting coat too tight to button. His pants were splitting apart at the seams. “He looks like a character,” she said.
Later, she said she didn’t understand Ms. Finger’s reaction. “It is history and can’t be rewritten,” she said. “I want to know every part, even the ugly parts of it.”