Nathan Pope was eighteen when he was convicted for burglary on November 29, 1879, and sentenced to five years. He was killed during an escape attempt two days after his arrival at what was known then as the Freeman prison camp—the location where the graves were uncovered. Jonathan Norton was twenty-seven, convicted for assault with the intent to murder and sentenced to five years. After seven months at the camp, he died of pneumonia. Esau Powell was convicted of theft in November 1875 and sentenced to six and a half years. He worked four years and two months before dying from chronic diarrhea in 1880.
Their graves were almost not found. The Fort Bend County Medical Examiner’s office concluded with ninety-nine percent certainty that the bone fragments discovered at the construction site for Fort Bend Independent School District’s James Reese Career and Technical Center on February 19, 2018, were not human. But Oscar Perez of the Fort Bend Independent School District wanted one hundred percent certainty before moving forward with construction. A forensic anthropologist at Sam Houston State University reported conclusively: the bone was human. To whom it belonged they did not know, but the single human bone led to the discovery of ninety-five graves and a reckoning for the town and the state.
Everywhere, they were called “The Sugar Land 95,” but I did not want to call them by the collective name that places more significance on the town than the people. Every utterance suggested they belonged more to Sugar Land than to themselves. When they were living, the state treated their labor as property, contracting them to work on plantations or for private companies. Now that they are dead, their bodies are treated as a single collective, evidence of a history that has been hidden in plain sight in the very soil on which the bustling suburb is built.
I wanted to know their names.
In September 2020, local and national news outlets announced that a newly published report included the names of those who occupied the graves. Trading my email and name for access via the Fort Bend Independent School District, I retrieved the report titled, “Back to Bondage: Forced Labor in Post Reconstruction Era Texas.” I looked first for the names. After a four-page spread acknowledging sixty individuals, two historical commissions, and the Fort Bend ISD school board for their part in conducting this study; after sections that explain the environmental and cultural context within which the graves were found; after archeological evidence detailing the perimeters of the dig; after an accounting of the methodology used for exhuming the bodies; after an attempt to historicize enslavement and convict leasing, or “the tragic history of the African Diaspora”; their names appear on page 254, buried in the middle of 535 pages.