In week of division, we published powerful story of coming together
Two women explore their connection to 1619
In August 1619, a ship landed at Point Comfort, Virginia, with “20 and odd” enslaved Africans, the first in the British colonies.
One woman, Wanda Tucker, believes her ancestors were on that ship. Anthony and Isabella, records show, were listed among those first Africans traded for provisions in the British Colonies. They later had a baby, William, the first identified African child baptized on mainland English America – the first African American.
The other woman, Pam Tucker, believes her ancestor, William Tucker, a Virginia planter and merchant, enslaved the small family. She knew her ancestors owned slaves, but she had no idea until reading USA TODAY’s 1619 coverage that her family’s slaveowning history traced back to the very beginning. Her ancestor was one of the first slave owners in the British Colonies.
USA TODAY invited the women to meet in Virginia, to stand at the water’s edge, where the ship would have docked, to walk Wanda Tucker’s family cemetery, to wander where Pam Tucker’s ancestral farm stood.
Toward the end of the visit, our story captures a painful moment.
“There’s something I need to say, too,’’ Pam told Wanda. “I need to say I’m sorry. If I can speak for my family, for myself. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’’
Wanda’s eyes got wet. She nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”
They were silent for a long time. Then Wanda said: “We didn’t create this. … You didn’t have to say that.’’
Pam nodded: “I needed to say that for me.”
USA TODAY has spent the year confronting the heartbreaking history of 1619.
“There were times I had to pause and take deep breaths,” says Deborah Barfield Berry, one of the project’s reporters. “There were times I cried. There were times I paused and thought, ‘I hope I’m doing this right.’ ”
To do it right, Berry, editor Kelley Benham French, visual journalist Jarrad Henderson and reporter Nichelle Smith traveled the back roads of Angola with Wanda, to be with her as she researched her family’s history. Wanda believes her family descended from that first recorded baby, William, but she also knew their story started well before Virginia.
Berry visited former sugar plantations in Antigua, where she wrote about the Caribbean island’s attempts to get reparations from countries that profited from centuries of unpaid labor.
And she scoured courthouse records in southeast Virginia, looking for her own family’s records. Her grandmother’s maiden name was Tucker, her family was from this area. She wondered: Could she possibly be related?
To everyone’s shock, she was.
This revelation, which she reported beautifully, added another layer to an already complicated story.
“For me and many others on the team, it felt like a responsibility. Not just to do good journalism, but to tell the story, and to tell it right,” Berry says. “And to tell it through the experience of what could have been our ancestors. And what turns out were my ancestors. “It felt kind of huge in that way.” Project editor Kristen Go had her ambitions as well. “We wanted to tell this history in a way it hadn’t been told before. And we wanted it to be approachable for people who have a hard time reading about or discussing race.”
With each story, “it got more powerful,” Go says.
Wanda and her brothers were flooded with letters and invitations to speak. Berry discovered her own link to the Tuckers. And then our reporter, Rick Hampson, found Pam Tucker, who agreed to talk. She then offered to meet Wanda, and Wanda accepted.
“I don’t think we could have found better people for America to learn from,” Go says. “At this difficult time of politics and race, here were two people willing to confront it.”
Berry hasn’t gone back to reread her stories, as she often does.
“I got a lot of reaction,” she says. “People still tell me that they cry. It still feels so close.”
She paused, composing herself: “It’s one thing to read about our history. But it has been a completely different journey to go to these places where they walked, where they were beaten, where they were tortured. It’s not just everybody else’s story. It was my story, too.”
Berry says above all, she and the team wanted to do the history justice.
“For so many years, it hasn’t been told,” she says. “Have we done everything right? We don’t know. But I feel damn sure good about trying.”
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