Free The House Girl by Tara Conklin

Carolina Sparrow, but everyone calls me Lina.”
    “Mmm …” He looked vaguely unsatisfied with this response.
    “Lina and Garrison are two of our brightest young associates,” Dan said. “We are all really excited about this project. Now let’s get down to specifics, shall we?”
    Mr. Dresser leaned back in his chair, crossed right ankle over left knee, and moved the end of his tie to the side of his expansive stomach. “My friends, this will be the largest, most important case of your careers,” he said. “I don’t care if you’ve been a lawyer for twenty years, or if yesterday was your first day at this venerable institution. This is the one you’ve been waiting for. We seek to right this nation’s largest, most enduring sin. We seek redress for hundreds of years of man’s inhumanity to man, trillions—let me say it again, trillions —of dollars in unpaid wages. The plaintiffs number, at the very least, in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly in the millions. We seek not only to compensate them for their ancestors’ sweat and blood but to memorialize, to remember. Who were they? Who were their oppressors? I want names named, on both sides. The truth telling, the testimony, the media attention that this litigation will generate—a public reckoning, so to speak—will allow these historic wrongs to finally be made right.” Dresser uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “You will help deliver the healing, the truth that this country needs. This lawsuit has the potential to, quite literally, rewrite history.”
    Dresser paused. His assistant’s pen scratched across paper.
    “And even if we don’t make it to trial, we’ll settle for a whole heap of money,” Dresser said. “Now what’s not to like there?” He chuckled and looked at Dan. “Right, Danny boy?”
    Dan smiled broadly. “Right. Now let’s talk about the plan.”
    For the next 4.2 billable hours, Lina listened while Mr. Dresser and Dan discussed the strategy for the initial complaint. They would use an unjust enrichment theory, arguing that twenty-two private U.S.-based corporations from various industries—tobacco, insurance, textiles, banking, transportation, energy, mining—had been unjustly enriched by using or benefiting from slave labor in the years before passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The descendants of those slaves are the rightful beneficiaries now of compensation for the forced labor enjoyed by those companies from the first documented slave sale in 1619 until slavery ended in 1865. That was a 246-year spread. That was roughly, Dresser calculated with a Clifton & Harp pen on Clifton & Harp–embossed paper, $6.2 trillion, including compound interest earned over time at a rate of 6 percent.
    The lawsuit would also target the federal government, Dan explained. This was where Dresser’s green light came in. “I’ve gotten confidential confirmation that, after we file the suit, the government will agree to issue a formal apology for slavery,” Dresser said. “We’ll pull the government claim and then the feds will put some pressure on our corporate defendants to settle.” He smiled. “It’s a nice little distraction, you know, atone for sins of the past, maybe divert attention away from the perceived sins of the present . But it’s the deep pockets we’re concerned with here. The government gets to look like a good guy, and we get some real weight behind us.”
    “Money won at trial or received through a settlement will go into a trust to fund a variety of programs and institutions,” Dan said, shooting glances at Dresser, who nodded in agreement. “A national slavery museum, a monument on the National Mall, college scholarships, educational programs, funds for minority-owned businesses, for community centers, for antiracism curricula in schools, the military, and the police. This is Mr. Dresser’s vision, and we’re here to help him achieve it.”
    Occasionally Lina or Garrison asked a question or made