Flash Nano 9 The end before the Beginning

 

Flash Nano 9  Tell a story with the ending coming before the beginning

She opened the package. At last, the journal with her article representing three years of research and writing.

She made herself a cup of tea and sat at her kitchen table. Reading each paragraph brought back the conflicting emotions during her search for the full story: horror, excitement, satisfaction, anger.

Her discovery of the ankle cuff that April day was almost an accident. Her job was at a museum which had just received a donation of pre-Civil War photos and other artefacts. In one phot, two girls, teenagers really, sat side by side. The white girl’s dress was lace decorated. The black girl’s was well made, but plain.

Friends? she thought. After taking a coffee break she looked at the photo closer.

Horrors!

Peeking under the black girl’s dress was a metal cuff. A chain was behind the girl.

That was the start. The more she delved into it, the more she discovered. It wasn’t an isolated case, but normal.

 

Black girls, who presented themselves well, were bought for daughters of plantation owners not just to serve their needs but to be a companion. The families buying the girls had special ankle cuffs made, often with pretty stones. The slaves were chained at night, sometimes in the same bedroom as their mistress, sometimes in an enjoining room.

 

The museum wanted to do an exhibition but had to overcome objections from the family who donated the photos as well as much money to the museum. The family thought it might make them look bad. After much cajoling, the family agreed. The exhibition, which had grown with other photos and cuffs that the museum later located, went on tour to eight cities.

 

At the Chicago’s exhibition, a woman came to her and said she was the great granddaughter of the woman in the first photo that had been discovered.  She told how her great grandmother’s stories were handed down. Their family later found a journal in their attic after the old woman’s death. The great grandmother wrote of her treatment, which was “Better than working in the fields,” the white girl was said to have said, but still she was shackled every night until she could escape. The journal was added to the exhibition.

 

Making herself a second cup of tea, she then thumbed through the journal with the original photo. Her research was the beginning, but the article publication was the ending. Or was it? Maybe a documentary or . . ,

 

Note this is based on a true story.