In the neighborhood where I grew up, family was so prevalent that I began to take them for granted. My grandfather and all of his siblings had grown up in the same neighborhood and many of their kids did the same. From 1995 until I left for college in 2007, I lived one block over from my grandparents in a house that my grandfather built. My mom still lives there today. Down the street was the house my grandfather grew up in, then occupied by a cousin and his family. Around the corner the other way was his sister’s house, where she raised her grandkids, my cousins. In the 14-block pocket of Blue Ash, OH called Hazelwood, I had several dozen family members within a 10 minute walk.
In contrast to how my grandfather’s side of the family was concentrated physically, my grandmother’s side was more spread out but did an awesome job of staying in touch. Not only did they stay in touch but they were big on preserving history, especially since we didn’t see each other as much as we would have liked. Anytime a family member visited Cincinnati, or nearby Louisville, KY, the rest of us converged on them for good food, limitless laughs and great music. For either side of the family, it wasn’t strange to have 50+ people show up for a function.
One of my great-uncles had recently passed away when my grandmother summoned me down the street to help move some stuff. She had cleaned out the valuables from his house and needed help carrying them into her basement. Most of the things were easy to carry but there was one thing that required myself, my uncle and my grandfather to carry.
It was a black steel safe. Only about two feet high, wide and deep. The dense walls were about six inches thick, though, making the safe just under 200 pounds. The three of us shuffled inches at a time through the garage and into the basement. My grandmother told us where to put it and it has remained there ever since then.
She then gave me the numbers to the combination and bet me $10 I couldn’t open it. She was right. It wasn’t like my high school locker: right to the first number, left past the second number once and then right to the last one. No, this one was much more complicated. Not only was the sequence finicky but the safe was almost a hundred years old and so the dial didn’t spin like it once did.
Eventually my grandmother opened up the safe. Even after watching her do it, I was unable to do it myself. She began pulling out papers. Because the walls were so thick, the opening of the safe was smaller than it looked but the contents within certainly deserved to be so highly guarded.
She thumbed through old letters, receipts of land purchases that were 100 years old and heralded family recipes. But it was the folded tea-colored handwritten paper that caught my eye. My grandmother noticed and began to unfold it. She reviewed its contents and said, “These are your great, great, great, great, great” before pausing, looking skyward to her thoughts and counting on her fingertips. “Great grandfather’s freedom papers.”
I didn’t understand at first, until she handed the paper to me. The first line read, “Peter Barnett Certificate of Freedom.”
I continued, “Virginia Augusta County Court Clerk Office to VA. Registered in the office, Peter Barnett now about 55 years old five feet ten inches high, a free man of dark mulatto complexion.”
It went on to describe the scars on his body before the clerk “subscribed [his] name and affixed [his] seal of office.” It was dated October 13, 1845. At the bottom on the left side, there was an oblong rectangle made by hand-drawn squiggly lines. Inside it, again handwritten, read “Seal of the County Clerk Agusta County State of Virginia.”
I knew that in my hands held one of the rarest historical artifacts of my culture. It was hard for me to conceptialize that this paper, seemingly not official at all, was once the greatest achievement of a man’s life. He had lived 55 years as a slave to receive this document which now, looks like it could have been written by an elementary school student. The idea that it was written before stamps, even rubber stamps, existed was unfathomable.
I mentioned how I was surrounded by so much family that I began to take them for granted. This paper changed that. Not just because it was cool, or really old, or even because it was once owned by a relative of mine but because it showed me that 16 years before our country would ultimately go to war over his right to it, my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather earned his freedom on his own. I imagined him during the war, when people were dying for the opportunity to keep him in chains, he walked the streets proudly with this paper in his breast pocket, clutched closely to his heart. I knew then that I wanted the honor of preserving this document for my generation when it was my turn.
