| Please welcome guest host Joe Heim, a staff writer who covers the Washington, D.C., region. Last spring, Maggie Haslam at the University of Maryland contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in doing a story on Dennis Pogue and Doug Sanford, archaeologists who have spent the last two decades documenting the former homes of enslaved people in Virginia and encouraging their preservation. It sounded like an amazing project, and so we started talking. Pogue contacted me in November to ask if I'd like to go see a former plantation called Sharswood in southern Virginia that had a building once occupied by enslaved people. And there was a possible twist. The new owners of Sharswood, he said, may be descendants of people once enslaved on the property. My ears pricked up. That's not a story you hear every day. Or, in my case, ever. In late November, I had a long phone call with Karen Dixon-Rexroth, whose brother Fredrick Miller, purchased Sharswood in May 2020. The story she told was astonishing, and she and her family had the receipts. Despite the many hurdles Black Americans can face in tracking their ancestry, they had established their link to ancestors who were enslaved at Sharswood. In mid-December, I traveled down to Gretna, Va., and met Karen, her mother and several cousins at the property. The next day, I talked with Fredrick, who lives in California. Over the course of the next few weeks, I was in near-daily email, phone or text contact with one or all of them, confirming facts, asking more questions. I'm sure they got sick of me, but they were polite enough to not show it. I'm grateful to all of them for sharing their story with me.  Sharswood was built in the 1800s and is currently located on 10.5 acres in Gretna, Va. The former plantation has a variety of outbuildings, including an office, at left, a brick smokehouse, back left, and a former slave cabin, behind the house and tree. A man who purchased a plantation home in the rural Virginia community he grew up in later learned its original owners had enslaved his ancestors. By Joe Heim ● Read more » | | | | Perspective ● By Robert Greene II and Tyler D. Parry ● Read more » | | | | Perspective ● By Anne M. Blaschke and Arghavan Salles ● Read more » | | |  Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.), whose district stretches from El Paso to San Antonio, was recently named co-chair of the Congressional Hispanic Conference. On Friday, Jan. 28 at 10:00 a.m. ET, Gonzales joins congressional reporter Marianna Sotomayor to discuss the organization's policy priorities, the Republican party's gains with Latinos and why he is urging conservatives to talk more about race By Washington Post Live ● Read more » | | | |
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