She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacy-a city crowded with monuments to the Old South. “And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.” “The intent was to keep that history buried,” McQuinn says today. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. “The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. “My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’
He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived-in the same house and on the same land-in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond. When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family’s roots.
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