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Works in Progress

After Slave Revelations, She Has a New Mission

From left: Kathy Voldstad; Onita Estes-Hicks; Ruth Wooden, who runs the Encore Transition Program at the Union Theological Seminary; and Michael Voldstad.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Every other Tuesday, Onita Estes-Hicks, 80, spends three hours in a New York City seminary contemplating her past and, just as important, her future.

It’s not silent contemplation, but time engaged with 15 fellow travelers who are part of the Encore Transition Program, a semester-long curriculum at the Union Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, right in Dr. Estes-Hicks’s neighborhood. Encore began last year to help retired and older adults make a change for the better, in their lives and in the world around them.

For Dr. Estes-Hicks, a former professor and chairwoman of the English department at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, that change has been a long time coming. In 2004, just after retiring, she found out she was the descendant of 13 of 272 slaves sold by Jesuits who once ran Georgetown. Now Encore is helping her make sense of it all.

While planning a family reunion 13 years ago in New Orleans, she and her niece decided to work out a family tree. They found that Dr. Estes-Hicks’s paternal great-great-grandfather, Nace Butler, a 50-year-old blacksmith; his 45-year-old wife, Biby; and their children were sold in 1838 by the president of Georgetown to settle heavy debts. The slaves were taken from their Maryland plantation and relocated to Louisiana. This was long before The New York Times reported about the Georgetown slave sale, and long before students demanded that the names of the priests who sold those slaves be removed from campus buildings.

One of the biggest challenges in dealing with the Georgetown story, Dr. Estes-Hicks said, has been reconciling her and her family’s Roman Catholic faith with the actions taken by the slave-owning Jesuits. Her great-great-grandfather’s Christian name, Nace, is short for Ignatius, after St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits. There have been several Naces in her family since.

“It was like our core identity was Catholic and was taken from us in ways we cannot sift through,” she said. The course at the seminary is helping her cope, she said. “Encore is helping give me a sense of destiny.”

The Encore program got off the ground just this past winter, and it offers readings, lectures and discussions to help inspire its adult students to find a new place in the world. The class is nothing if not diverse: There is a worker for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority about to retire; a Buddhist drummer from upstate New York looking to make a difference; an alumnus of the seminary who travels from Atlanta every two weeks to meet with the group; and a married couple from Manhattan. Dr. Estes-Hicks is the oldest member of the group.

In 2004 at a family reunion in New Orleans, Dr. Estes-Hicks and her niece Patricia Bayonne-Johnson announced the startling news of the slave sale. “We were poised to do some additional work and, boom, here comes Katrina,” she said.

Dr. Estes-Hicks and her relatives spent the next six years dealing with the hurricane’s aftermath. Dozens of relatives lost their homes; their parish church was destroyed. Over 50 relatives were displaced throughout the country. “It was an incredibly crazy period of our lives,” she said.

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Nace Hicks Sr., who was named after his grandfather, Nace Butler, of the 1838 Jesuit slave sale.

Finally, once that seemed settled, Dr. Estes-Hicks decided to turn the family’s attention back to Georgetown.

Then in 2015, the story broke of the Georgetown slave sale. Dr. Estes-Hicks got in touch with Georgetown officials last fall and told them she and her family were going there to get some answers — “making a pilgrimage to retrieve our past,” as she put it. They emailed her right away and helped organize a visit to the campus. She and 43 of her relatives met with the university’s president and began a dialogue.

“We were looking at things like faith and racial reconciliation and social justice,” she said. “Looking for where to go next.”

Then last year, Dr. Estes-Hicks saw the Encore program advertised.

Serene Jones, the president of the multidenominational Union seminary, said Encore was designed for people like Dr. Estes-Hicks, who were at a later stage in life but still looking to effect social change. “You only have so much time left to make a difference in things you care about,” Dr. Jones said. “We’re all works in progress. You can deny it or you can embrace it. And I think that’s what Encore is about. These people are embracing the challenge before them.”

Dr. Estes-Hicks was familiar with the seminary and its work. She earned her Ph.D. in 1982 from Columbia University, across the street from the seminary. “I thought, I need a container,” she said. “I need to situate myself where I can handle all this information for me and my family. That’s what I’m trying to blunder through now. Where are we going?”

The day after the first Encore class, Dr. Estes-Hicks was scheduled to be interviewed by Georgetown about her family, and thinking about it, she started to get angry all over again about the slave sale. So angry that she almost didn’t make it to that first Encore class on Jan. 31.

Ruth Wooden, who runs the Encore program at Union, said there were many lapsed Catholics who had applied to the program.

“And one very angry Catholic,” Dr. Estes-Hicks said.

But Dr. Estes-Hicks showed up and was the first to introduce herself to the group.

Ms. Wooden said the rest of the class was stunned by her opening remarks. “She lays her story out about what she’d learned about her own history and everybody’s mouth was just hanging open,” Ms. Wooden said, laughing at the memory of that night. “Nobody wanted to follow her. But everybody’s story was rich.”

Ms. Wooden, who graduated from the seminary as part of its master of arts program, has been involved in the larger nationwide Encore movement for the past 20 years and suggested to Dr. Jones that an Encore program be established there.

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Dr. Estes-Hicks researched archival documents about her slave ancestors.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Aside from discussions and class work, the students will be paired with a social justice organization in their field of interest by the end of the semester.

Michael Voldstad, 69, another Encore participant who has long worked as a lawyer in the financial sector, said he would probably be retiring by the end of the year and wanted to give back in some way. His wife, Kathy, 63, who has a graduate degree in mental health counseling from New York University, teaches meditation and yoga part time to patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She received a second graduate degree in clinical psychology from Teachers College at Columbia last spring, and is trying to find where and how to apply all that she has learned.

“It’s not about just doing another job or task, but finding more of a calling,” said Mr. Voldstad, who will probably do financial work for a nonprofit.

Being on the peaceful seminary campus, with its Gothic tower, Oxford-style dining hall and stained-glass chapels, helps elevate the discussions every two weeks about rediscovery and social justice.

Dr. Estes-Hicks said the setting made a big difference: “So many of us are so grateful to have a place to come to rebuild lives because this whole damn culture is falling apart, there’s all this destruction. This whole movement is about reconstruction.”

She said Georgetown had made an effort to address the slave sale, not only hosting her extended family on campus to share archival material but also searching for more descendants with the help of Ms. Bayonne-Johnson, offering legacy status to those applying to Georgetown and developing an African-American studies department. The university will make its formal apology to the descendants at an April 18 religious service and building-renaming ceremony. The Jesuit order announced on Monday it would attend and make its own apology.

Dr. Estes-Hicks said she was happy with the university and Jesuit response but wanted the reconciliation work to continue. She said she joined Encore to get spiritual guidance and to develop a plan. “In many ways this experience is like Katrina, when we were looking for everybody,” she said. “What happened to this person? Where did they land? Every few weeks I discover a descendant from Louisiana who wound up in another part of the country. I have all those cousins who are in these other places.”

Ms. Wooden would like Dr. Estes-Hicks to team up with a public policy group, Demos, to work on reconciliation and race issues.

Dr. Estes-Hicks said she would perhaps like to start a foundation on behalf of her relatives. And though she is not sure what the answers to all her questions will be just yet, she has thought of a name for her approach: Descendants Ascending.

“We’ve got to strengthen ourselves so we can deal with this,” she said. “I don’t like the feeling that we’re the object of their study. There’s a way for us to get back our own family story. I think it might be to reorganize the descendants in some way.” She paused and nodded her head. “But we’ll work it out.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: New Mission for a Retiree. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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