Slave families used distinctive names to reunite after forced separation.

Evidence

“The old folk gave their children unusual names because families were so often violently separated during slavery,” my mother explained. “This was how kinfolk could keep track and later found their loved ones.” — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 35

Categorization

• BMF: The naming-as-reunification-device mechanism reverberates with the genealogical ‘who owns the image’ core of this book, and evokes the forced-family-separation and name-keeping themes in Things Fall Apart (Okonkwo’s names and chi identity threads).
• XREF: Ties to the reparations argument: names were an autonomous infrastructure enslaved people built inside an archive designed to erase them.