Hecimovich offers thoughts on early images of enslaved

In an article appearing in ProPublica, Gregg Hecimovich, a Furman University professor of English, comments on the “vapory trail” left by formerly enslaved people and the difficulty their descendants face when tracing family lineage. Hecimovich offers his views as part of a lengthy piece by Jennifer Berry Hawes who sheds light on who should have stewardship of some of the earliest known photographs of enslaved Americans. The 15 photos, or daguerreotypes, of seven South Carolina slaves are currently housed at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Hecimovich has spent more than a decade researching the people in the photos and contributed to a 2020 book of scholars’ essays about them. “The people behind the images embody, to my mind, mini-histories of the American experience, only this time a history that white Americans willfully tried to erase, and still try to bury,” he said.

Hecimovich is working on a book about the images as part of a fellowship with Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, “The Columbia Seven: The Life and Times of the Zealy Daguerreotypes”. His first fellowship with the institute in 2014 led to biography project “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of The Bondwoman’s Narrative” due out Oct. 17.