Owners having children with their slaves wasn’t as uncommon as a lot of people wanted to believe. Most people knew the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemming, though the accuracy of the claim was still being debated, even after DNA testing showed a strong likelihood that someone from the Jefferson male line was in their lineage. Even if it hadn’t been Thomas Jefferson who’d done it, the man who’d fathered Sally’s children could have been one of his male relatives. And it was impossible to know whether or not Sally had consented to sex.
That was the other reality no one with Southern roots wanted to acknowledge. The majority of owner-slave children came from rape, whether the violent sort or the more…subtle kind where the slave didn’t fight it, but they also didn’t really have a choice either.
If I was right about the reason for the resemblance between Obadiah and Joshua, I wondered about the how as much as the who. No family tree was ever perfect, and I was sure everyone had at least a few criminals taking up a branch or two along the way. The one thing I’d had to accept when I’d decided on this project was that I would probably find things about my ancestors that would make me sick to my stomach. Rape would definitely be one of those things I didn’t know how to handle.
Nyx’s face flashed into my mind.
I couldn’t change anything, not in anyone’s past, but I could try to bring the wrongs to light, to make sure that those who could be held responsible would be, and those who’d survived got whatever closure they could. Maybe that’s what I could do for my next film. Nyx could even help me with the research. It could help her deal with–
Nope.
I wasn’t going there.
I wasn’t going to do that. My first instinct when it came to her was to protect, but I couldn’t decide how or why or what she did to deal with her baggage. Even if we’d been in a real, committed relationship, it wouldn’t have been my place. Advice if she asked, but otherwise, I needed to keep my mouth shut and support her.
And do my job.
Back to my research.
Two hours later, I’d gone through everything in the folder, and my mind was spinning. I’d definitely found what I’d been looking for, and it was worse than I’d imagined. In fact, I was now fairly certain that I’d discovered what Nyx was down here investigating.
And why my sister had those boxes in her library.
They knew. At the very least, my dad knew and had given Ashley the boxes to hide, probably giving her more than the one so he’d be able to claim that they were random boxes.
I wouldn’t put anything past him.
The real question was, did Ashley know?
I had a lot of problems with my sister, but I wanted to believe that she would do the right thing. If she knew the truth, though, and hadn’t done anything about it, then she was no better than our father. And if Mom knew, she was guilty too.
I rubbed my forehead. This was crazy.
But I couldn’t deny it. I had too much evidence, and the story was too compelling. Even now, it was running through my head like a film, like my film.
Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Matthew and Ruth Calvert were shown in a local paper as being the owners of a rather large piece of property. The property where my family’s home had sat for generations. That wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was the article just underneath it. An article about the arrest of a slave named Zachariah Adams for assaulting his owner’s son, fifteen-year-old Matthew Francis Calvert. Adams claimed that the teenager was harassing the slave’s daughter, Deborah.
The next article was from a couple days later, stating that Adams had been hung for the assault.
Next came a record of slaves born on the Calvert plantation roughly eight months later. A list that included a child named Rachel, whose mother was listed as Deborah Adams. No father was recorded. Two of the other babies had fathers listed, and I had a sinking suspicion that I knew why Rachel’s father wasn’t.
I didn’t have a direct link from Rachel to Joshua, but if Rachel was the daughter of Francis Calvert, it would explain why Joshua’s skin was so light and why he shared features with Obadiah Calvert. I remembered now that Matthew