Deep Reads: A stranger bought the home where her family fled slavery
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2023
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
Stephanie Gilbert wrote a letter to Jungsun Kim, the new owner of Richland Farm in Clarksville, Md. In the letter, Gilbert laid out centuries of her family’s remarkable history: the five generations of her enslaved ancestors who had labored at Richland Farm and a neighboring plantation for one of Maryland’s most prominent families.
Gilbert explained in the letter that she’d established a relationship with the White descendant who had inherited Richland — the woman who had just sold the estate to Kim for $3 million. During a decade of visits to Richland, she said, “we’ve celebrated Juneteenth, commemorated the ancestors, wept for their trials, and celebrated their triumphs.”
Then Gilbert made a request: Would Kim allow Gilbert, a stranger, to continue to visit the 133-acre estate where her enslaved ancestors are buried?
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This story is part of a collection of new, occasional bonus episodes you’ll be hearing from “Post Reports.” We’re calling these stories “Deep Reads” and they’re part of The Post’s commitment to immersive and narrative journalism.
Today’s story was written by Sydney Trent and read by Adrienne Walker for Noa: News Over Audio, an app offering curated audio articles.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Sydney Trent, local enterprise reporter for the Washington Post, and I'm |
| 0:06.1 | bringing you the next story in a new weekend offering from post reports. |
| 0:10.2 | We're calling these stories deep reads. It's part of the post commitment to |
| 0:15.1 | narrative journalism. Today's story is a piece I wrote, read to you by a narrator |
| 0:20.8 | from our partners at the app NOAA, news over audio. This is a story of a black |
| 0:27.6 | woman's intense desire to pay tribute to her enslaved ancestors on the |
| 0:34.6 | plantation where they labored. And the question is, would the new owner of |
| 0:40.5 | Richland Farm let her do it? The story kind of deals with a sort of personal |
| 0:47.5 | question of reparations. We are used to talking about now, I think, this idea of |
| 0:53.7 | governmental reparations, what society owes, what states owe, what communities owe, |
| 0:59.1 | but not thinking about what people might owe. And I'm not necessarily talking |
| 1:04.8 | materialistically at all, but what people might owe on a personal level. And |
| 1:11.0 | this was a really good vehicle, I think, for that because you could see that one |
| 1:16.2 | family was the direct beneficiary of enslavement. And then on the other side, |
| 1:21.6 | you can see, you know, the disenfranchisement and the frustration. But I think |
| 1:28.0 | that there are several perspectives and they're all valid perspectives. And I |
| 1:34.6 | think it becomes hard to say, absolutely, somebody should have done this or that |
| 1:40.8 | given the way we feel about personal property in the US and material |
| 1:47.5 | ownership. I've had people tell me that they've just found themselves continuing |
| 1:55.5 | to think about the story. And I think that that's the best outcome. She'd |
| 2:03.6 | rehearsed what to say and written a letter explaining herself. Now on an |
| 2:08.5 | afternoon in early May, Stephanie Gilbert pulled up to a liquor store on a |
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