It wasn’t until Kieran Haile broke his hip at age 29 that he began to learn about how traumas from America’s early years are more than a dissociated story from the past. His brittle bone disease, he learned, is a consequence of slavery in the American south, when white slaveowners would rape Black women – eventually, perhaps, raping their own daughters. Kieran Haile, the great-great-grandson of Alexander Manly, and his wife, Priscilla Haile, visited Wilmington for the first time in September of 2021.
It wasn’t until Kieran Haile broke his hip at age 29 that he began to learn about how traumas from America’s early years are more than a dissociated story from the past. His brittle bone disease, he learned, is a consequence of slavery in the American south, when white slaveowners would rape Black women – eventually, perhaps, raping their own daughters. Kieran Haile, the great-great-grandson of Alexander Manly, and his wife, Priscilla Haile, visited Wilmington for the first time in September of 2021.