you all have read melton mclaurin's book and that is the popular book length treatment of celia's storybut i want to sketch out that narrative for the group as his of our discussion today. again, this comes as a fragmentary narrative, one driven by the court record, the legal artifact in the case. first, there is very little for us to say about celia's young life. we don't meet her in a formal sense in the historical record until she is how old? do you remember? anybody? 14 years old, right? she is 14 years old when she first appears to us. she is, as we come to understand it, a young in slaved woman in central missouri and she is purchased by robert newsom, a small farmer in the county of callaway, the town of fulton in missouri. he purchases celia, and almost from the very moment of that encounter, our story is framed because we learn celia is very soon sexually assaulted, some say even in the journey back to fulton, but certainly very quickly after they arrived at his farm. what is this place to which celia had come? we know that he is a recent widower. in his household are his child