The pictures of Jim and Sarah (Sally) Stallworth hung on our family room wall along with all of the other family members in our bi-racial family.  Jim’s picture was especially intriguing to our visitors as they could not tell whether he belonged to my family or to my African-American husband’s family.  Sally was very dark with Negroid features so there was no doubt as to her ancestry but Jim could have been English or Scottish with his straight hair and light eyes.  Family oral history was not clear so there was no agreement.

As time went on I became more and more obsessed with the answer to this question.  Was he white?  Was he the son of a white slaveholder? Since there was no agreement in the family, I became determined to find the answer.

One of the known facts was that Jim had been born into slavery in South Carolina in 1842.  Also known was that he had purchased land in 1895 in Alabama–land which remains in the family today. It was while visiting the property in Alabama that I began to identify with this man who had come from the depths of slavery to being a small land owner and the progenitor of eight children and numerous descendants.

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