Description: After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant "information wanted" advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide listeners back to devastating moments of family separation when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores these heartbreaking stories and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freed people as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. She also shows how searches for family members in the postCivil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history today.
Brief description:
Heather Andrea Williams is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.
Review Quotes:
"History, as we are reminded by this book, is told from the perspective of those with power. Robin Miles' confident oratorical style gives the listener a sense of empowerment regarding the attempts of African-Americans to recover their family histories lost through the institution of slavery. Miles' tone is crisp, her pace steady, and her style journalistic, all of which suit the theme set out by the author. Though full of facts and minute biographical details, Miles' evenly paced reading draws the listener into the personal aspects of these stories. She differentiates between the male and female recollections by changes in tone. She also creates successful narrative personas to delineate the journal entries, reported dialogue, and overall narrative text."
-- "AudioFile"