They lived with professors and waited on former presidents. They were masons and nurses, school teachers and field hands, 246 people owned by a man who struggled with the institution of slavery. Yet, almost no one knows their names. When a white woman begins to study the history of the plantations these people built, the plantations where she was raised, she discovers that the silence around these people's lives speaks of a silence in her country's history . . . and in her own life. A creative nonfiction, history book about American slavery and its legacy in the United States.