Ridgway Public Library

A gripping, radically intimate debut novel about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners. On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys--as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself--have decided to turn around the farm's bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a "stockman"...

'How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nations collective history, and ourselves

"Let us descend,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world.'" --Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver...

Journalist Ball confronts the legacy of his family's slave-owning past, uncovering the story of the people, both black and white, who lived and worked on the Balls' South Carolina plantations. It is an unprecedented family record that reveals how the painful legacy of slavery continues to endure in America's collective memory and experience. Ball, a descendant of one of the largest slave-owning families in the South, discovered that his ancestors...

Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often...

As the country enters a new era of conversations around race and the enduring impact of slavery, The Hairstons traces the rise and fall of the largest slaveholding family in the Old South as its descendants-both black and white-grapple with the twisted legacy of their past. Spanning two centuries of one family's history, The Hairstons tells the extraordinary story of the Hairston clan, once the wealthiest family in the Old South and the largest slaveholder...

Will Harman's bold clan had come west to build new lives, but they had quickly divided. When the strong and spirited family members stake their claims in the untamed land, their lives take different paths. One will find passion and financial success, while two join the Jesse James gang and another will lead the posse that goes gunning for the outlaws. All will be blinded by hate and as rage and vindictiveness dissolve the family's plans, each member...

An adaptation of Alex Haley's "Roots", in which Haley traces his African American family's history from the mid-18th century to the Reconstruction era. Golden Globes (USA), 1978: Best TV-Series - Drama. Emmy Awards, 1977: Outstanding Achievement in Film Sound Editing for a Series ; Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore) ; Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series ; Outstanding Film Editing in a Drama Series...

Eighty-one letters written from Louisiana by the Massachusetts-born-and-bred Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox recounting her experiences as a small slaveholder and the wife of a physician who cared for the slaves owned by wealthy sugar planters in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.