The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book , which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year’s edition were alphabetized, but only roughly—all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B , but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after. I began with the 1848