Assembling narratives of enslaved people’s lives is a painstaking process requiring a great deal of patience and—more often than not—a fair amount of luck. This is not because enslaved people’s stories have simply grown faint with time, but because of how they were recorded in the first place—when they were recorded at all, that is. Enslavers—a group that violently denied enslaved people access to literacy—took up pen and paper as weapons of commodification. In letters, law books, business records, bills of sale, estate inventories and printed advertisements, enslavers represented the enslaved not as human beings but as property.

Yet this is our archive. We must feel for its pulse. Scrawled in the lines of ledgers. Tallied in plantation journals. Numbered on ship manifests. Here are millions of ancestors. Here are generations of loved ones. Here—in an archive of death—is life.

With only one record in hand—one unit of data—enslaved people are memorially frozen in time, having neither past nor future, and without the context of kin and community.

Suspended this way in the archive and spreadsheets, enslaved people are denied the right to be remembered as they were: human beings with befores and afters, and with kin and kindred who made that distinction meaningful.