Description: In this tapestry of intersecting stories, including those of her own family, Rashauna Johnson charts the global transformation of a rural region in Louisiana from European colonialism to Jim Crow. From her ancestor Virgil to her cousin Veronica and her hand-sewn Mardi Gras memorial suit more than a century later, this history is one of triumphs and trauma, illustrating the ways people of African descent have created sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance. Johnson uses her grandmother's birthplace in East Feliciana as a prism to illuminate foundational, if fraught, aspects of US history including colonialism, slavery, war, citizenship, and unfinished freedom. The result is a portrait of the world in a family, a family in a region, and a region in the world that insists on the bristling and complicated relationships of people to place and creates a new understanding of what it means to be American.
Brief description: Rashauna Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of the prizewinning book Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions.
Review Quotes: 'This is a book I have been waiting, yearning, for. In this important and beautifully written work, Johnson takes up the sorely neglected topic of Black homemaking/peacemaking in the rural South, rural but not unconnected to regional, national, and global webs of circulation - of economies, revolution, and knowledge. It is a powerful story not of people 'run off' but who stayed and fought and found 'warmth under the same old sun.'' Thavolia Glymph, author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household