The Mystery of Henry Fordham

The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War.

The names in each year’s edition were alphabetized, but only roughly—all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.

I began with the 1848 edition, but there was no listing for a Henry Fordham. The same was true of the book for 1849. Same for 1850. But as I slowly made my way through the F section of the 1851 edition, I let out a shout that shattered the library’s decorous hush: “Yesssss!” Then, quickly, to the startled patrons and librarians: “I’m so sorry, excuse me, I’m so sorry.” And then, more softly: “Yes.”

I had found him.

On March 27, 1829, a wealthy white planter and businessman named Richard Fordham purchased four enslaved African Americans from a woman named Isabella Perman. One of them was my great-great-grandfather, a boy called Harry.

This transaction took place in Charleston, the port of entry for an estimated 40 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to toil in this country. A document recording the sale was filed with the South Carolina secretary of state several days later, on April 7. It does not say where in Charleston the sale took place—on the steps of the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon, perhaps, or at the Cooper River docks, or in one of the thriving markets where people were bought and sold. The individuals bought by Fordham are listed as “a Negro boy named Harry and a Negro woman named Jenny and her two children named Hager and Margaret.” For the lot, Fordham paid $1,080.

Harry, whose proper name was Henry, spent 19 years as Fordham’s chattel. The young man proved to be quick of mind and good with his hands: He mastered the art of blacksmithing at the Chalmers Street Forge, which Fordham co-owned. Henry’s skills eventually made him Fordham’s de facto right-hand man at the forge. On July 10, 1848, Fordham sold “a Negro man named Henry” to Otis Mills and Co., a grain-wholesaling business with multiple warehouses near the Cooper River docks. The sale was recorded with the secretary of state seven days later. The company’s eponymous founder, one of Charleston’s richest men, went on to build the city’s most luxurious hotel, the Mills House. The price he paid for my great-great-grandfather was $2,000, a lot of money for a single Black man.

According to family lore, Henry had somehow circumvented the state’s strict law against educating the enslaved and become literate. He had also become deeply religious. Not only had he learned to read the Gospel of Jesus Christ; he’d also heard the call to preach it.

A few years after being acquired by Mills, Henry Fordham was purchased one final time—by himself, when he bought his freedom.

I’ve always known, through my family’s rich oral history, that my extraordinary great-great-grandfather obtained his liberty at some point before the Civil War. For a long time, however, my attempts to find out exactly when and how he cast off his chains ran into dead ends.

When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to go looking for my family’s history. It was already right there, all around me. My sister, Ellen, and I were born and raised in Orangeburg, 75 miles northwest of Charleston, in the house that Henry Fordham’s son—a formidable man named John Hammond Fordham—built for his family in 1903. Anchoring the corner of Boulevard and Oak Streets, the house is a characteristically southern structure—one and a half stories, with white wooden siding, two graceful bay windows, four dormers poking through the roof, and a wide wraparound front porch that serves as an auxiliary living room during the hot months.

We knew that important family talismans lay in a big, black safe that John Hammond Fordham kept in the main bedroom. It looked like a cartoon safe, the kind that the Road Runner used to drop on Wile E. Coyote’s head, and it was incredibly heavy, which is probably why it still sits there today.

When I was growing up, the safe was always closed but never locked. I was curious about everything, and so sometimes, while my grandmother was busy in the kitchen, I would peek inside. But the old, yellowed papers that I found didn’t mean anything special to me.

Once I became a journalist, I realized that my family’s house, documents, photographs, and oral history constituted an extremely rare gift. All of that material told an important story; I didn’t know what it was, but I had the sense that I was destined to find and share it. Life and career had a way of intervening, however, and for decades I put off the exploration of my family’s past.

I returned to those annals in earnest when I realized two things: First, that my family’s history vividly traced the repeated cycles in which African Americans win a greater measure of opportunity, only to have much or all of it taken away again. With the materials in my house and a bit of research—a lot of research, as it turned out—I could show this pattern in action, over two centuries. Second, I saw that our history is every African American’s history. Through slavery and emancipation, Jim Crow and civil rights, war and peace, all that Black Americans have ever wanted is a fair chance to pursue the American dream.

Family lore said that Henry may have arrived in Charleston from Barbados, one of the British islands in the Caribbean where Africans were “seasoned”—conditioned to the lash—in the sugarcane fields. When my wife, Avis, and I went on vacation to Barbados in 1996, I decided to look for traces of my family in the National Archives. We drove around for quite a while—on the wrong side of the road—until we found the place, which I remember as a graceful old building filled with natural light.

In a big reading room, we sat at a long table while helpful staff members, accustomed to visits from Americans seeking their roots, brought out materials they thought might help us with our search. A day of poring over records, however, gave up nothing more than hints and shadows. Discouraged, we went back to our hotel and I called Aunt Grace—actually one of my mother’s many first cousins—who was the family’s chief genealogist.

I had been looking for records of slave owners named Fordham, but she explained that the name hadn’t attached itself to our family until after Henry’s 1829 sale to Richard Fordham. Instead, she said, I should look for a Black woman named Jenny—the “Negro woman” who was sold at the same time as Henry. Jenny’s previous owner, Isabella Perman, had the maiden name Fell. So I should look for a woman named Jenny who had some connection with those two surnames.

We returned to the archives, and a senior researcher named Shirley Archer helped us renew our quest, bringing out reels of microfilm and precious old ledger books recording births, baptisms, and deaths. We finally found a family named Fell that had lived in Barbados in the early 19th century, in St. Philip Parish. We also found a family in the same parish named Perreman—pretty close to Perman. And we found that on November 27, 1793, an enslaved adult named Kitty Fell was baptized at St. Philip’s Church. She would have been the right age, I thought, to be Jenny’s mother.

But we could find no record of Kitty having a daughter, and no record of Kitty being sold away to Charleston. We had bits and pieces that might fit together, but we couldn’t figure out how. English planters in the Caribbean kept meticulous records of the horses they bred and raced, but they couldn’t be bothered to keep even rudimentary family histories of the human beings they claimed to own.

It was Aunt Grace who learned that Henry Fordham had been sold to Otis Mills in 1848. And I knew Henry had been free before the Civil War and emancipation, because I found his name in the 1861 Charleston city census, appended with the notation f.p.c.—“free person of color.” By then, I reasoned, he must have been a free man for some time, because the census showed that he already owned two wood-framed houses in the city. It must have taken him at least a few years to accumulate such assets.

But exactly when, in that 13-year gap between his last sale and his first appearance in the census, had he become free? I examined real-estate records, scoured the family Bible, searched archives in reading rooms and digital databases, looked everywhere I could think of—and didn’t find a clue. By the 19th century, manumission was essentially illegal in South Carolina, which did not entirely end the practice, but it meant there would be no official document recording the moment of Henry Fordham’s freedom in the secretary of state’s archives.

The South Carolina Historical Society, a private institution founded in 1855, is the first stop for researchers seeking information about the antebellum period. I visited its grand neoclassical headquarters on Charleston’s main thoroughfare, Meeting Street, several times over the years to look for anything about my great-great-grandfather that might pin down the date of his freedom. No luck.

In 2014, the society’s collection was moved across town to the College of Charleston so that the archives’ original home—a landmark 1826 structure known as the Fireproof Building—could be turned into a museum. Slowly, more records were digitized, or at least preserved on microfilm. In February 2023, I visited the collection at its present location, a hushed sanctum on the second floor of the college’s Addlestone Library, in the hopes that more of the hit-or-miss manumission records from Henry Fordham’s time might have been cataloged and made accessible.

I was overjoyed when the librarians found a folder labeled with Henry Fordham’s name—but then immediately deflated when they brought it out, because I saw that it contained only a long, speculative, and largely inaccurate account of Henry’s life, compiled by a distant relative whom I’d never met. I was already familiar with that document, and I knew it said nothing about when Henry had liberated himself.

Finally, one of the librarians suggested that I look through editions of Charleston’s Free Negro Book. I’d had no idea that such a thing existed: a yearly list of free African Americans residing in the city who had paid the state’s poll tax. It was an exercise in data collection born of paranoia. The fact that Black people outnumbered white people in South Carolina during the decades before the Civil War meant that white officials lived in constant fear of a Haiti-style Black uprising. Free African Americans were a tiny minority—more than 95 percent of Black people in the state were enslaved—but it seemed to make sense that any rebellion would be led by conspirators with independent resources and the liberty of unsupervised movement. White southerners took great pains to keep track of men and women like Henry Fordham.

And there he was.

I doubt I will ever be able to find out the month and the day my great-great-grandfather became free. But I can be quite sure that he was still enslaved when free African Americans were counted in 1850—and that he had become a proud, free Black man by the time the Free Negro Book was compiled in 1851.

Even after solving this mystery, I never stopped wondering about my deeper history, before the time of Henry Fordham. Who was my first African ancestor to set shackled foot on this continent? He or she had a name. He or she had a clan, a language, a culture, a faith. All of this history is forever gone.

There was nothing at all inadvertent about its disappearance. It was stolen. Slave owners in the English colonies of the New World went to great lengths to sever any ties that their captives had with the past and with one another. Enslavers’ fortunes and lives depended on being able to control the able-bodied Black men and women who outnumbered them—20, 40, 60 Black bodies crammed into slave shacks, versus maybe a dozen white family members in the big house. Our captors could not allow us to feel confident in the strength of our numbers. They wanted us to feel powerless, ungrounded, disconnected, and thus easier to dominate.

[From the December 2023 issue: Lonnie G. Bunch III asks why America is afraid of Black history]

I feel the absence of my deep, pre-American history. I feel it the way an amputee suffers phantom pain in a missing limb. I keep looking for what was stolen from me. And occasionally I glimpse what might be fragments of it.

When I was little, among the out-of-town visitors who would occasionally drop by to visit my grandmother and great-aunt were two women from Charleston. I don’t remember their names. What got my attention was that they spoke to each other in an incomprehensible, rapid-fire patois that definitely wasn’t English. I learned they had been speaking Gullah (also called Geechee), a creole language based on English but laden with a hodgepodge of West African vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.

Gullah is possibly a corruption of Angola, a region from which many Africans were seized. Or it might refer to the Gola people, an ethnic group living on land that is now in Liberia and Sierra Leone. If you have ever referred to peanuts as “goobers,” you are using a Gullah word that comes from the Kikongo term for “peanut,” nguba. On the islands around Charleston—including Daniel Island, where Richard Fordham had his plantation and my great-great-grandfather grew into manhood—Gullah evolved as a lingua franca that allowed enslaved Africans from different cultures and language groups to communicate. Henry almost surely would have understood every word those women who visited were saying.

Somewhere in Africa there is a city, town, or village where Henry Fordham’s progenitors lived and died for hundreds or thousands of years, where my distant relatives walk the streets today. That place exists, and I know I will never find it. Still, I can get closer than was possible even a few years ago, thanks to DNA testing.

In 2022, I mailed away a saliva sample and waited, with no real expectation of an aha moment. When the results came back, I learned that 34 percent of my DNA comes from Nigeria, 20 percent from Mali, and another 26 percent from other places up and down the west coast of Africa. That doesn’t depart from what I’d have predicted, and it doesn’t narrow things down meaningfully.

[Read: 300 million letters of DNA are missing from the human genome]

The remaining 20 percent of my DNA comes mostly from Germany, with a small contribution from the British Isles—again, no surprise. The fact that part of my genetic inheritance comes from Europe makes me like most Black Americans: According to a 2010 study, “an African American individual in the United States has, on average, about 75–80 percent West African ancestry and about 20–25 percent European ancestry.”

Someday, perhaps, the collective human genome will be sufficiently mapped to trace my DNA to a specific Nigerian village or English hamlet. But the truth is that race has never been a biological fact. It has always been a social construct, which allowed the powerful to justify exploitation of the powerless. The elaborate fiction of race gave Richard Fordham the “right” to purchase my great-great-grandfather, and required Henry Fordham to purchase his own freedom. And it is race and racism that have kept me from knowing the names, let alone the hopes and dreams, of Henry’s predecessors in my American history. So I begin with him.

This article was adapted from Eugene Robinson’s new book, Freedom Lost, Freedom Won: A Personal History of America. It appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “The Mystery of Henry Fordham.”