Uncovering Appalachia’s Hidden Heroines: Pauletta Hansel Reveals Untold Stories in Understory
L.L.: There are definitely some darker truths that surface in your family history, like all families and all histories. What took your most by surprise, shock, or dismay?
P.H.: It was most definitely my family’s history of enslavement of those of African descent, beginning with Margaret, that plucky little Jamestown Bride, who willed an enslaved servant to her grandson alongside heifers and cows. And then later, in Appalachian Virginia, one set of great-grandparents who were also early Methodists enslaved teenagers within their household. I had worked with the assumption that because my family and their communities were poor mountain people we were largely free of a slaveholding history, and that is simply untrue.
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