When reparations discussions began to make big news, I didn’t need to understand what, exactly, was being proposed — money, acknowledgements, land, legislation — in order to know in my bones that they were due. The ways in which wealth was built on the backs of Black folks but kept well out of their hands was something my body carried and knew. Then, I knew it vaguely. Now, I know it intimately.
Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of this story can be found by clicking these links
In the summer of 2019, as Ta Nahesi Coates testified to the House of Representatives and our nation finally entered into semi-serious discussions about reparations for Black Americans, I made contact with the great-great-great-grandson of a man, Zeike Quarterman, who my great-great-great-grandfather, George Adam Keller, had enslaved. In a single email exchange with Randy Quarterman, whom Google allowed me to find and whose generosity and openness allowed me to investigate this issue, I was stunned to learn that Zeike Quarterman’s descendants still owned ten acres of land given to him by George Adam Keller after Sherman’s Field Order №15, in 1865, just outside of Savannah, Georgia. I also learned that although the Quartermans had been paying taxes on the land all along and no one disputed that they owned it, they had been denied access to it for decades by surrounding landowners and were unable to get help in obtaining access from the county. Now, the Quartermans were losing an acre of their land to the county for a parkway by eminent domain. How much more would the county take? What does it mean if we allow land reparations given to descendants of formerly enslaved people, back in 1865, to be taken away in 2019? What does it mean if, further, that family is underpaid? The county offered the Quartermans $2,500 for the parkway acre. The fair market value for the land is $10,000 an acre. The county claimed the Quartermans would need to produce a “clear title” to receive the fair market price. But, like all heirs’ property, it sits under a “cloud title.”
In July, I had no idea that the Quarterman family existed. In August, Randy and I began speaking daily about how to save the land, about which individuals might have locked them out of the land and why the county hadn’t been helpful, and about what I could do to make some small amends on behalf of my family. I…
