Personal Reparations 3: Heirs Property, “Safe” Words, and ‘Slave Play’
- Spoiler alert: This essay details the last scene of “Slave Play.”
- Part 1 and Part 2 of this story can be found by clicking these links.
“Understand…” seventy-four-year-old Andrew Quarterman Jr. said to me from across the table as I ate avocado toast at Le Pain Quotidien in Manhattan’s financial district. Our Living Cities board meeting would take place later in the WeWork offices upstairs, on the thirtieth floor. “People don’t want you to do this.”
“This” was telling our story of trying to save the Quartermans’ reparations land from condemnation and unfair market pricing. “This” was telling it far and wide, to the CEOs of some of America’s major foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, Bank of America, Bill & Melinda Gates — that sort of thing, in the next few hours. “This” included discovering a frequently shady land grab for warehousing involving the usual suspects — Amazon, Target, Walmart — that the national and local governments, and large “Georgia Ports Corporation A” would like to keep quiet in order to control increased financial interest in Port Wentworth. “This” included following a lot of dead leads from white attorneys who referred us to other white attorneys with reputations for railroading Black families right off their land (and the challenges we had with finding…
