By Nichelle Smith, USA TODAY
JAMESTOWN, Va. — Valarie Gray-Holmes sits quietly, her back to the audience gathered at benches under oak and cypress trees by the James River at Virginia’s Historic Jamestowne.
She smooths her beige, cotton skirts and grease-stained apron as she waits to be introduced. The peach stripes on her blouse are all but faded and her yellow headscarf is wrapped loosely around her salt-and-pepper hair. As the waves splash against the riverbank, she rises slowly, silently. She turns to the audience and begins her story.
“Every day I rise, and I come to a place and I cry,” she says.
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CLICK FOR FULL ARTICLE: She was captured, enslaved and she survived. Meet Angela, the first named African woman in Jamestown
