Cesar Lyndon’s Sundry Account Book cannot anticipate his declining health or the war that disrupts his selling of goods and the business of his slave-trading account holders. He lives and works for another thirty years—until about 1794. He lives through the Revolutionary War which nearly destroys Newport and certainly deadens its trade economy; the famed slave traders and ship captains—Champlin, Lopez, Wanton, Vernon, Godfrey—do not move their goods as well until after the new nation forms. Even after the war ends and trade returns, it’s unclear whether Lyndon continues to keep an account book or to sell stuff as he once did. What I do know is that he doesn’t make lists that hope for the freedom that he will one day receive (he will join Newport’s Free African Union Society in the 1780s and serve as its clerk and accountant). Instead, his account book asks us to consider yet again what we understand to be the limits of the library and its special collections and also what we mean by literacy or even hidden. Lyndon’s account book isn’t hard to find. Lyndon doesn’t have a hidden literacy. It is public throughout the 1760s and thereafter. Today, it’s well-catalogued and well known at the Rhode Island Historical Society. Hidden is our word, and it describes how we understand what we don’t know. Lyndon is here for us to see, to learn and ask new questions of those numbers and words that are part of his everyday life. Yet his stories are not those about which we write or even know. His literacy and numeracy are oddities to us because we’ve learned about how difficult, if not impossible, it was for enslaved women, men and children to receive an education. But it’s true that Lyndon knows what he can do with letters and numbers too. What Lyndon’s account book does is help us understand our assumptions and expectations as we navigate libraries and archives. It’s us—scholars, present-day, readers and students—who expect Lyndon as an enslaved man to be illiterate and immobile or even unique. Lyndon’s account book requires us to look at our expectations and in particular, what we deem hidden or even how we imagine literacy. If we go learn his numbers and his double-entry bookkeeping we’ll see what’s hidden to us and find their communities of friends, lovers, and families who care for and tend to each other.