I found out that I had a hair appointment before work started this morning. I had a really nice drive down to Ithaca and around the lake-- listening to classical music and letting my mind wander from illustration to graphic design to little side projects to cooking. I was musing over the book I am reading about the Hemmings at Monticello and the history of slavery. The author sets the stage by describing a conference she was attending about a new body of information that was presented about the slave trade and how the shipping/import of slaves happened. The author was stunned by the way the slaves, these people, we presented as a metric but not as individuals with names, history, place of origin. She was stunned by this revelation-- that these people were still, today, dehumanized by the sheer lack of information and identification. The Hemmings family is a slave family whose identity is interwoven since their arrival in the America colonies with that of the family of Thomas Jefferson's wife and then with Jefferson -- so there is written history, names, dates, locales, that can be linked with this family and the individuals associated with them. This should be an interesting foray for this winter.