Mira slowed her pace to let everyone pass her up to the plantation’s entrance. Before her trip, she checked out the website created to draw visitors, hoping to get a good sense of what to be prepared for. She’d read the story about Alden Jones. His ancestors had made their wealth from rice. His great-great-grandfather, Macon Jones, had owned one of the largest plantations in the Carolinas, but after he died his wife learned they were drowning in debt. To make do, she sold off their slaves to owners all along the coast, followed by the selling off their land. The family who bought the property, the Whitetons, maintained the plantation up until the war. Afterward, they returned and lived in the house, passing it down from generation to generation, until the last relative to inherit turned the house into a museum. Those who visited thereafter knew it as the Whiteton House. The Whitetons made no mention of the owners who came before them, erasing Alden’s connection to this past.

Alden discovered the Woodsman house after seeing the Woodsman name repeated in several slave bills of sale he’d found when searching through his own family records. Woodsman had been the largest purchaser of Macon’s slaves. One bill of sale between them marked the transfer of ninety-two slaves for close to thirty thousand dollars. He decided that with this house he’d rebuild his legacy lost, he’d remake it in his history.

Mira had clicked through photos of the Woodsman house. A mix of surprise and horror at the extent of the renovations kept her from looking away. Gone were the chipped paint and the broken windows, which was to be expected, but several structural changes had been made—a double-sided staircase led up to the front porch entrance, for instance. A new roof with tarry shingles to match its shutters, painted in contrast to the whiteness of the exterior walls and Greek Revival columns. Other structures had been built for effect. A courtyard full of other dependencies necessary for plantation life—a cookhouse, a well, a washhouse, a pantry. Mira had scanned through the images, trying to discern what had been built from what she remembered, but each image was more unfamiliar to her memory than the last. The overseer’s house, the slave cabins, she did not recognize, but at the graveyard she stopped and leaned closer to the screen. WOODSMAN FAMILY GRAVEYARD, the caption read. Mira had lingered on the image for a few seconds, wondering what part of her own story lay buried here too.