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Help Me to Find My People: The African…
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Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture) (edition 2016)

by Heather Andrea Williams (Author)

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1122241,706 (4)7
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 readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.… (more)
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Title:Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
Authors:Heather Andrea Williams (Author)
Info:The University of North Carolina Press (2016), Edition: Reprint, 264 pages
Collections:Wishlist
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Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery by Heather Andrea Williams

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As an African-American woman, I am aware that my slave ancestors were sold and separated at will. This book shares slaves' narratives about separation and the perspective of their owners and other whites about how they believed the black sale did not care or even have the capacity to grieve. I was unable to make it to the end of the book as I got the point. I was sad. The other did a could job with the historical accounts. ( )
  Valarena | Feb 20, 2021 |
This is the type of book that tells the reader something they may known in principal, but makes it vividly and tragically alive: the separation of African Americans by sale or gift during slavery, and their attempts to to reunite, especially after emancipation. The pain of the slaves at being separated, and of the children at learning that they could be separated, is wrenching. I was surprised to see how much they were able to keep the memory of the details of former owners, and even write letters to owners while still slaves, to try and keep track of their relatives. Unfortunately, name changes and multiple sales meant that most would never be reunited. Given it's length, about 200 pages of text, it took me a long time to read it, because it is all so painful.

It also examines the self-serving beliefs of their owners that their slaves simply didn't feel as strongly as they did themselves, and the separations were not as painful. There is the tender letter written by a slave-trader to his wife, while he is on the road separating other people from their relatives. Another master wrote about his guilt in having to sell ten of his slaves to pay his debts, and hopes it will be a lesson to him about extravagance. Apparently not, since forty more of his slaves were seized for his debts. After emancipation, he writes bitterly that he had sold the lot of the "ungrateful" wretches while he still could.

One flaw that I find in the book is that it is a bit redundant. After reproducing a document, Williams tends to inform us in detail, almost line by line of what we just read. In one case, she reproduces a second document on the same subject, subjects it to the same detailed explication, and then analyzes the two documents together.

This is truly heroic research on William's part. The amount of labor that it must have taken to find all of these advertisements, letters, and recollections is daunting. She has done future historians a great service in finding these. I hope that they could be collected and digitized on the Internet to make them more widely available. ( )
  PuddinTame | Sep 6, 2020 |
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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Heather Andrea Williamsprimary authorall editionscalculated
Fry, SallyDesignersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Miles, RobinReadersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Williams, ClayCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
I learned about grief that night, the kind of endless, bottomless grief that can find nothing upon which to anchor itself, that stretches itself out into a long howl ending in a hollow silence.

Elizabeth Nunez, Beyond the Limbo Silence
Dedication
In memory of my father,
ANDREW E. WILLIAMS
and for CLAY, again
First words
This is a book about slavery and family and loss and longing. (Introduction)
Early in the fall of 1836, N. A. Hinkle of Snickersville, Virginia, wrote a letter of five lines to slave trader William Crow in Charles Town, Virginia.
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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 readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade. Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.

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Table of Contents

Introduction p. 1-18

Part 1. Separation p. 19-21
Chapter 1. Fine Black Boy for Sale: Separation and Loss among Enslaved Children
pp. 22-47
Chapter 2. Let No Man Put Asunder: Separation of Husbands and Wives
pp. 48-89

Chapter 3. They May See Their Children Again: White Attitudes toward Separation

pp. 90-116

Part 2. The Search
pp. 117-119
Chapter 4. Blue Glass Beads Tied in a Rag of Cotton Cloth: The Search for Family during Slavery
pp. 120-139
Chapter 5. Information Wanted: The Search for Family after Emancipation
pp. 140-168

Part 3. Reunification
pp. 169-171
Chapter 6. Happiness Too Deep for Utterance: Reunification of Families
pp. 172-189

Epilogue: Help Me To Find My People: Genealogies of Separation
pp. 190-202

Notes p.203
Bibliography p. 225
Acknowledgments p. 235
Index p.239
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