Speaking to her reflection in a wall-to-wall mirror in her grandmother’s living room one evening, 10-year-old McKinzie Domer summoned her great-great-great-great grandmother.

“Fredonia, you have helped me,” she said. “When I’m having a hard time, I think about what the slaves went through and what you went through.”

After a pause of silence and a lean forward, she asked her ancestor what it was like to travel as a young girl with her slave owner from Aberdeen, Mississippi, to Virginia, before the Civil War. Read More