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Nurturing a NARRATIVE A family heirloom compels Victoria Schott-Miller to champion authors of color by COURTNEY NAPIER photography by EAMON QUEENEY 32 | WALTER
hat would you do if you held a link to the humanity of a near-mythical figure in history? Through a serendipitous series of circumstances, Victoria Scott-Miller came to possess such a treasure, and it set the course for her future in an unexpected way. Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, the Scott family lived a life surrounded by art and beauty. Father Victor Scott was a freelance photographer, plugged in to the opulent lifestyle of famous friends like Lena Horne and Al Jarreau. These relationships were exciting, but also opened him up to the world of drugs. By 1986, he and his wife, Pamela, had just celebrated their daughter Victoria’s first birthday and were expecting their second daughter, Jessica. If they were going to survive as a family, they had to make a drastic change. They left behind the life they knew and moved to Philadelphia to begin the road to recovery. During a rummage trip to the basement of their new home, Victor Scott found a Bible trimmed in gold. His wife noticed right away that it was special. She pleaded with her husband not to pawn the book to satisfy his addiction, but after realizing that this was a losing battle, she insisted on at least keeping the thick stack of papers tucked inside. The years passed. Victor Scott overcame his addiction, but the couple divorced in the 1990s. Pamela Scott had the papers examined by Sotheby’s— they were indeed valuable, appraised at $50,000—but even though she was by then a single mother and needed the money more than ever, she declined their offer. Her intuition said that this possession was more significant than money. When Victor Scott passed in 2017, Pamela Scott finally gave the papers to her eldest daughter, Victoria Scott-Miller. Scott-Miller immediately went to work to untangle their origin story. The handwritten notes, she soon discovered, were an exchange between legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nathanial Knight, a white bookstore owner
