Those early records coincided with the first land lottery in Georgia in 1805, when white men over twenty-one and white widows were given a chance to each win a plot of land of a little over two hundred acres, with the odds of winning were approximately one in ten. In this way, the territory became Putnam County. Treated as an empty space, instead of the home of the Creek who had already lived there. This was how Samuel Pinchard had come to own Wood Place Plantation.
Samuel Pinchard’s journals were so boring, they made me drowsy, even with my years of training. There were accounts of his bargaining with suppliers for feed and livestock and for lumber—and there was much bargaining, because Samuel was an exceptionally cheap man.
But my persistence was rewarded when I realized the date of Samuel’s visit to Savannah, which I’d seen in his journal, placed him there in early March 1859, during the weeping time auction. Not only that, Samuel somehow had also made the acquaintance of Matthew Thatcher, the benefactor of Routledge College, who’d accompanied him to the auction. When I called Dr. Oludara to let her know what I’d found, she told me, hang up. She would call me back, because this was going to be a very long and expensive conversation.
Indeed, 1859 had been a very eventful year for Samuel Pinchard. In addition to the weeping time auction, there was the death of his daughter, he’d received the letter from Nick, an enslaved man who had run away, and then in July, two more deaths had occurred. Leena and Rabbit, two enslaved girls, had died in a fire that destroyed a structure Samuel had called “the left cabin” in his journals. I read and reread those entries in Samuel’s journal: “10 July 1859 Fire in Left Cabin. 11 July 1859 Rabbit & Leena dead.” Two short entries, that’s all he’d recorded of the death of those girls. Rabbit had been the twin sister of Eliza Two, the girl who would become my direct maternal ancestor.
Burning was such a horrific way to die. I couldn’t even imagine that kind of agony, both for the girls who perished in the fire and those who couldn’t save them. The loss of a sister was a grief that never waned. This is what Eliza Two must have experienced, after Rabbit died. Samuel Pinchard didn’t have to write that down in his journals. I understood that grief already. I still dreamed about Lydia, and when I awoke, I still felt cheated that she wasn’t alive.
*
For my presentation on the archives in late October, I took twenty minutes to detail the initial records that I’d found in the papers of Samuel Pinchard. I focused on the descendants of two women, Mamie and Ahgayuh, specifically on Nick, who’d been born on Wood Place in 1821, married Ahgayuh’s daughter, Tess, and sired twin girls with her, Rabbit and Eliza Two. In 1851, Nick had run away, but sometime on or around June 26, 1868, a letter had been mailed to Samuel, signed by Nick. He’d written Samuel on the older man’s birthday, though that milestone hadn’t been mentioned—perhaps the timing of the letter had been a coincidence. But the tone of the letter was quite rancorous, as Nick described in generalities what he termed Pinchard’s “thousands of evils.” In another folder in the Pinchard papers, I’d found a flyer offering a reward for Nick’s return. The sketch and description of Nick indicated he’d been of mixed-race heritage, though he did not identify his probably white father in his letter. Therefore, it wasn’t clear whether Samuel Pinchard or another white man had sired Nick.
Though I wasn’t sure how Dr. Whitcomb would respond, I outlined my kinship to Nick, that he was the father of Rabbit and Eliza Two, that the latter girl would become my fourth great-grandmother. Dr. Whitcomb only nodded at this information; I couldn’t tell whether I’d made a mistake or not, talking about my family connection. I ended by noting that the Old South Collections librarian had told me no one had examined the Pinchard family papers since 1934, the year Thomas Pinchard Jr. had donated them to the university. His daughter, Cordelia Pinchard Rice, was the last legitimate descendant of the family, although there were plenty African Americans in the Pinchard line.
Rebecca raised her hand. “How do you know there are Black descendants of this family?”
“That’s a really great question,” I said. “I know because Pearl Freeman Collins was the daughter of Thomas Pinchard Sr. This is common knowledge in Chicasetta. And Thomas Sr. was the grandchild of Samuel Pinchard.”
“But what proof do you have of that? Did Pearl take a paternity test?”
“No, Mrs. Collins didn’t, but—”
“—then how do you know?”