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Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.

When people think of slavery, they think of an era from the distant past. Grainy photographs from Civil War times. And yet it goes on.

I've heard 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe's pen hasn't begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I've seen de real thing, and I don't want to see it on no stage or in no theater.

It is all around us, hidden in plain sight. It is walking our streets, supplying shops and supermarkets, working in fields, factories or nail bars, trapped in brothels or cowering behind the curtains in an ordinary street: slavery.

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.

As a kid growing up St. Louis, Missouri, I lived in a predominantly black neighborhood. Any time people talked about slavery, it was always something like, 'If I was a slave, I wouldn't have been putting up with that. I would have been out in a heartbeat.' And it's like, sure, it's a very easy thing to say.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

I think we're all a little afraid of the dark. If you lived in the country, as I did, there's nothing quite like country dark, which was really black. And as a child, your imagination runs wild.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.