I’ve never been comfortable at protests. I get claustrophobic in crowds. I can’t hear well enough to understand the raised voices laying out the grievances. My knees get sore, and my feet hot. I start thinking about how far I am from home and when can I leave. I get hungry and can’t sit down to eat. When I care about something, I’m more likely to write a letter to the editor or contact a member of Congress or donate money. So it was not usual for me to find myself on the corner by the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls at 6 p.m. on July 4, holding a Black Lives Matter sign.

Last January, before COVID, in the North Carolina Archives, I discovered documents related to the Cheatham side of my family. Their last wills and property deeds are packed with references to enslaved people they owned, traded and/or left as bequests to their next of kin. Some Black people were given as wedding gifts. Others were loaned to a cousin on another farm. When I watched the video of Derek Chauvin pressing George Floyd to the pavement in Minneapolis, I wondered how many of my ancestors’ enslaved were killed in the same way.

After the election in 2016, I began, with a small group of people, to read books about race. Racist rallies around the country in 2016 and 2017 reminded me of similar events in Smithfield, N.C., where I grew up. It was the Jim Crow South, complete with KKK rallies, segregated movie houses and restaurants. Though 50 percent of the residents of Smithfield were Black, I knew only a few, and they were all in service to white people. The woman who worked for my mother came into the back door of our house and rode in the back seat when we took her home. She was not introduced to me as “Mrs. Russ.” She was Glovenia. I learned her last name years after I left home when I happened to ask my mother what it was.

So there I stood on the corner next to the Iron Bridge on July 4, holding a sign that read “Black Lives Matter.” I’d spent the afternoon with friends reading the Declaration of Independence and Frederick Douglass’s “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?” This vigil seemed like the right thing to do on that day.

But I had worn the wrong shoes and my feet hurt. It was hot by the bridge, and I had nowhere to sit. So my partner, Ann Gibson, and I walked across the street to stand in the shade in front of McCusker’s Market/Co-op. I asked Sherrill Hogen (who was there and had told us about the vigil) how long it lasted. “An hour,” she said. I looked at my watch. We hadn’t eaten dinner beforehand. I was hungry. Same old feeling — “This is really not my thing.”

And then something happened. I thought of Glovenia, and of the other Black people who helped raise me — Martha White, my grandmother’s companion for 40 years; Joe and Louise Lassiter, custodians at the school I attended for 12 years; Louise Smith, who worked at the house of my best friend, Kay; Zeke, who lived in a small cabin behind the “big” house of my godparents; Minnie, who nursed me when I was a baby. And suddenly I knew why I was standing there. I was standing there for them, proclaiming that their lives mattered — of course, to me — but also to everyone driving by. And that the lives of the enslaved people owned, traded, sold and abused by my ancestors mattered. And that the lives of all of their descendants, all the way to George Floyd and beyond, mattered. And that standing there was one small way I could hold them, remember them and feel their courage rising up from my sore feet and tired knees.

I raised my sign higher. I smiled.

Annie Cheatham is a resident of Conway.