So I think there are moments when it does enter us in a kind of personal way. I had to get up and take a walk to deal with it. The casual cruelty of that was emotionally overwhelming for me. Here we have 17 people listed as property - between a Brussell carpet and 10 yards of flax. I remember being almost overwhelmed in that moment as I read. Their ages, their names and what they did. It goes on for pages, I mean there are hundreds and hundreds of items in it and toward the end, I read through these harpsichord’s and piece of chairs and tables and I came across the names of 17 slaves. They did a legal appraisal and somehow I got a hold of this and I was reading through it. I did have a moment this is just occurring to me, I was given an inventory of everything that was in the Grimke house at the time when their father died. Once I began to really look at their lives, it wasn’t the slavery that shocked me, it was that they overcame or transcended those views. I had to find out about them by going to New York from Charleston. That someone from a slave holding family could be one of the first female abolitionist agents in America was an amazing revelation. A: The big surprise was that I didn’t know about them.
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