Prologue (an excerpt)

Elizabeth Lee, grand dame of local history in King George, Virginia, wasn’t returning my calls. She wasn’t answering my emails, either.

I discovered the first traces of Anarcha in 2015, in Alabama, where her name was recorded as “Anaka” and “Anarcky.” (“Anarcha” itself is a specter, having appeared only in Sims’s autobiography.) The search continued for years in archives, probate offices, public and private libraries, and privately held manuscript collections. I followed Anarcha from Alabama to Virginia, then to New York City and Connecticut, and finally back to Virginia. I knew she had lived for a time in Bowling Green, Virginia, but from there the trail went cold. It remained that way until I learned that her final master had lived on a plantation called Alto, about twenty miles to the north, in King George.

If there was anyone who might know what happened in King George, I was told, it would be Elizabeth Lee.

Lee was writing a book of her own—perhaps I was not hearing from her because she feared that our research was in competition. (It wasn’t.) I kept trying her contact information for another week, until I ran out of ideas for how to continue the search for Anarcha.

Full of trepidation—fearful that a years-long quest would end in mystery—I set out for King George. I was desperate, but Anarcha felt very close at hand.

Lee was the president of The King George Historical Society, an organization housed in a tiny room lined with shelves and cabinets displaying fragments of King George history. She wasn’t there when I arrived, but it was the South: a kind woman promptly gave me her address.

I knocked on Lee’s door. I was wrong to have feared that she was avoiding me. She was eighty years old, and worked diligently on her book every day. She didn’t have much use for email and voicemail; my messages had never reached her.
She agreed to help me at once. I followed her back to the historical society, and we arranged some chairs in the center of the room. I told her the story of Sims, the experiments in Alabama, the enslaved women who had been used to usher in a new era in women’s health. I mentioned Alto, the plantation that I believed was important to the very end of Anarcha’s story.
When I said the name “Anarcha,” Lee perked and sat upright—and gooseflesh rose on the back of my neck.

“That name,” she said. “Wait a moment…”

She rose to her feet—it was an effort—and pulled down from a shelf a loosely-bound cemetery book, created by Lee herself. Working for decades to transcribe and combine a variety of ancient, hand-scrawled Virginia vital statistics records, she had created a comprehensive catalog of all the known cemeteries in King George County. There was just one entry for the former Alto property: a single grave for Annacay and Laurenzi Jackson.

I already knew that in Virginia the unusual name Anarcha had a shortened form: Ankey. Much later, I learned that Lee had transcribed Anarcha’s death record into a separate book, though she had not connected the death record of “Ankey Jackson,” wife of “Lorenzo” to the “Annacay,” wife of “Laurenzi,” interred on the Alto plantation.

Lee explained what had happened. Some years before, a local man named Jim Pettry had been hunting on land behind his home on Eden Lane, which runs north-south through Alto. A quarter-mile deep into the forest, on a small, elevated wedge of land, Pettry happened across a gravestone, snapped off at its base, face down, mostly covered over with dirt and leaves. It wasn’t a graveyard; the stone was alone in the woods. An amateur genealogist himself, Pettry tipped the stone upright, leaned it against a tree, and wrote down what it said on its face. That’s what Lee had transcribed into her cemetery book.

At this point, I had known Elizabeth Lee for about ten minutes. I was a complete stranger. In two minutes more, we were in a car headed to Jim Pettry’s house.

Pettry wasn’t home at first. I nearly got Lee’s minivan stuck in a giant mudpuddle—but later in the afternoon I caught Pettry at home. Lee wasn’t with me; she couldn’t have managed the hike out to the grave. Pettry agreed to guide me. It was only a few hundred yards behind his house, but the forest wall at the edge of his property was a sharp cliff-face of foliage, like the barrier in a storybook marking the line between the safety of home and the danger of the woods. Through the veil, the land was thick with shrubs and mud and creeks, and we climbed up sharp inclines from streambeds to narrow bluffs, and scampered over rotten fallen logs. I was completely lost ten steps into the forest, and I have gotten lost again on each of the half dozen times I have returned.

Pettry was a talker. Like a mountain man, he knew every snag and every turn of the streams, and as we walked he pointed out the locations where he had shot a deer for meat. As we approached the grave, he began a long speech about a genealogical mystery he had been attempting to solve for years: the story of a distant relative, a man who had survived a mob’s effort to hang him.

I was only barely listening as we arrived at the gravesite. The stone still leaned against the tree Pettry had propped it against, and rain had been chiseling away at the granite for more than a century. I had to get close to make out the entirety of its text:

IN
Memory of
LAURENZI JACKSON
Died Sept. 28 1884
Aged 67 years
Also his wife
ANNACAY JACKSON
Died June 27 1869
Aged 48 years
Gone but not forgotten

I had found Anarcha, but I did not rejoice at this moment. After years of study, reading, and searching, there was still a great deal of work to do: verification in census records and documents of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands more commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. There was much more to learn about Anarcha’s final years. As I read the stone over and over, clearing dirt and dead leaves from near its base, I recalled the moment when I’d first come across the story of Sims, the craven and conniving physician who had been enshrined as a hero with biographical portraits sparkling with tortured, celestial imagery. Sims, one commenter claimed, was “the first bright planet that appeared in the dim light of [the] dawn [of gynecology].” Another asserted that among the luminaries of the professional firmament, Sims had “appeared as a comet, leaving a path of light that would forever reflect luster upon the medical art.” The Medical Record, a prominent journal of the day, stated it bluntly: “Then, like a meteor, appeared the genius of Sims!”

When I began work on Sims, I found it easy enough to scrape away at the façade of a false legacy. By way of contrast, Anarcha had fallen into the abyss of the past.

At Anarcha’s gravesite, I thought about facts. Facts tend to hide—they may even resist discovery. But with hard work, perseverance, and luck, the truth can be unearthed. Without Jim Pettry hunting in the woods, without Elizabeth Lee and her lifetime of devotion to primary sources, Anarcha might never have been found. Lee published her own book in 2021; she died not long after.

For a time, Jim Pettry and I stood reverently in the silent ache of the woods.

It was the end of the search for Anarcha, but it was just the beginning of telling her story.