CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE — FINDING ANARCHA’S GRAVE
[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]
In this penultimate essay of our series, we’ll look at how I found Anarcha’s grave — after years of searching — in the middle of a remote forest in Virginia.
As I said in earlier essay, I got stuck in the search for Anarcha at about 1864. I knew that she had been leased to a man named Charles Mason, and a letter from Mason to James T. White offered a few details about what her life was like, but I didn’t know who Charles Mason was.
My search in Virginia had started in Caroline County, but there weren’t any Charles Masons in Caroline County.
I didn’t figure that out until I started asking questions in counties neighboring Caroline County.
That brought me here, to the probate office of King George County, Virginia. It’s not much from the outside, but a lot of the secrets of Anarcha’s life were waiting inside.
Charles Mason, I learned, had a large plantation called Alto somewhere near King George — but where?
Everyone I met in King George told me that the person to ask was a woman named Elizabeth Lee, who was the main force behind King George’s tiny historical society.
But for a while, as I was conducting this part of the search, I was still staying in Bowling Green, which is about twenty miles away. I got a phone number for Elizabeth Lee, and an email address, and I reached out to her. But she never answered me! I’d been told that she was working on a book of her own, and I worried that she wasn’t answering me because she was afraid that we were in competition.
I waited until I ran out of ways to try to find Anarcha. Then I went back to King George. I had to find Elizabeth Lee.
And so I came here. I thought it was going to be tough, but this is the South. I met a very nice woman here, and when I said I was looking for Elizabeth Lee, she gave me an address.
This is Elizabeth Lee. She died a few years after she first helped me, in 2017. And the truth is that I never would have found Anarcha without her help.
And I shouldn’t have been worried when she didn’t answer my emails and phone calls. She was eighty years old, even then, and didn’t have much use for voice mail and email.
She answered the door when I knocked, and when I explained why I was there, she got ready and we rode right back up to the historical society.
We sat, down, and I started to tell her the story of Sims in Alabama, the fistula experiments, and the young woman known as Anarcha.
Elizabeth perked up in her chair when I said that name. She got up — it was a bit of an effort — and she pulled a book down from a shelf.
This is the page she turned to. There was an Annacay and Laurenzi Jackson buried on land nearby — on land that had once been the Alto plantation owned by Charles Mason.
What had happened was that a hunter named Jim Pettry had been out in the woods behind his home. A few hundred yards into a quite impenetrable forest, he found a gravestone, all by itself — not part of any graveyard — broken off and lying face down. It was partially covered over with leaves and dirt.
As it happened, Pettry was an amateur genealogist. So he wrote down what was written on the stone, and he brought it to Elizabeth Lee.
When she heard the name Anarcha, she connected it to this entry — Annacay.
If you haven’t read the earlier essays in this series, you might be wondering why the names are so different. It might be a good idea to go back and look at a few earlier essays, where we talked about how Anarcha’s name changed over time. But even now, we see Anarcha’s name in different forms. In 1870, she’s “Anaky,” married to Lorenzo, also in King George.
I didn’t find this until much later, but this Anarcha’s death record. As we noted in an earlier essay, Anarcha was known as Ankey — and here she is, Ankey Jackson, wife of Lorenzo Jackson. It turned out that Elizabeth Lee had transcribed this record for another book, but she’d never connected it to the Annacay in her cemetery book.
It took a while to find all of those things, but that’s the first thing that Elizabeth and I did. After she pulled down her cemetery book, we hopped into my car and drove out to the Alto plantation to find Jim Pettry.
It took a while to find Jim, but eventually it led here. It all looks pretty normal from the outside, but inside — just a few steps away — it all felt very wild and far away. In the coming years, I would visit Anarcha’s grave on five or six occasions, and either going in or coming out, I would get lost every time.
I thought about a lot of things as Pettry and I approached the grave. He was a talker, so he was telling a story about some of his own genealogical work, but I was only half listening. I was thinking about how hard history is — how sometimes it seems like facts intentionally hide, and resist our efforts to uncover them. But when we finally arrived at the grave, I was heartened because I knew that however hard a history seems, however lost someone might appear to be, the truth is still out there, waiting to be discovered.
For a time, at the site of Anarcha’s grave, Jim Pettry and I just stood there in the silent ache of the woods.
Next time, in our final essay, we’ll look at a little more about what can be said about Anarcha’s final years.
