History of Alabama by Albert James Pickett

If these bits and pieces told a story, I wasn’t ready to hear it. I called this trove “The Pile” and quarantined it in a closet. From my father, I inherited an archive about our Alabama kin: wills bequeathing family oil portraits yellowed newspaper clippings about antebellum homes-turned-museums hand-drawn genealogical charts. I barely identified with the person I’d been the year before, let alone with distant ancestors. This was not an upbringing that encouraged looking to the past. I attended 17 schools in five states and two countries, reinventing myself each time we moved. Banks, was born in Montgomery in 1912, but he left his roots for the itinerant life of a career Army officer. The man Karen believed was Milton’s enslaver was my great-great-grandfather on my father’s side. But in all her searching of slave inventories, she couldn’t find anyone named Milton. His first enslaver was a planter in Alabama named Pickett.Ĭombing through records online, Karen established that Pickett had owned two cotton plantations, Cedar Grove and Forest Farm, both near Montgomery. As a girl, Karen heard stories about her great-grandfather, who told his children he was born in the 1850s to free people of color in Muscatine, Iowa, but that when he was a child he was kidnapped by slavers and taken with his family down the Mississippi River. Karen Orozco Gutierrez, of Davenport, Iowa, is the great-granddaughter of an enslaved man named Milton Howard, whose life she has long worked to document. These days, descendants of both slaves and slaveholders come to the archives seeking the truth about their past. We were an odd couple, Karen and I, when we first arrived at the Montgomery County Archives in Alabama.

History of Alabama by Albert James Pickett