Fontleroy Plantation
panel 1, 20" x 15" · panels 2 and 3, 32" x 32"
flags, each 4” x 5” (66 flags, one for each slave)
While he was a practicing attorney, the Reverend Samuel Turner, Jr., of Memphis discovered the 1862 inventory of Rittenhouse Nutt’s possessions in the Hinds County, Mississippi, courthouse. A great-great grandson of Nutt through union with an unknown slave, Reverend Turner immediately noted in the inventory the identity of his great grandmother (Frances, 18 yrs, $600), the only written documentation of his family’s oral tradition of descent from Nutt. (African Americans did not receive birth certificates until 1870.) I am Nutt’s great-great grandson by his wife, and Sam Turner and I consider each other cousins because we share a sixteenth of our blood from Nutt.
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