#unreadshelfproject2020 Really great book. I am enthralled with cemetery research hand this book certainly had that. The restoration of alive Cemetery in Texas is so much more than just the cemetery. Slaves are buried there and their stories along with their ancestors are fascinating. Would love to visit this place someday. “The living are not always with us...and the dead are. It always gone.” ( )

This wasn't the book that I thought it was going to be when I read the back cover. I was expecting more of a historical exploration of freed slaves in Texas, or perhaps how their descendants were faring, or...something like that. Instead, I got a memoir that really should have been condensed into a few-page article, to be honest.

The author hops around everywhere - her own history, antebellum Texas, the Jim Crow laws, land deeds, land theft, the people buried there, their descendants, and her own feelings. Wow, does she spend a lot of time on her own feelings. I swear, she spent more time discussing a misunderstanding she had with one of the descendants than anything else.

The author also spends a lot of time talking about her "guilt." I can't remember if her family owned slaves (I am thinking no), but she said that they profited from a world where slavery, and Jim Crow, happened. I honestly don't get why she feels guilty. If SHE were racist, yeah, that's something to be guilty about. But no one is responsible for what their ancestors did. If that were the case, whenever I met a German I would expect them to apologize to me - which I don't. It's one thing to say, "Hey, I'm sorry what my ancestors did to yours." It's another to internalize that and make it your own guilt. Maybe I'm odd, but I don't get it, and I don't get why the author really struggled with it, and it mired down the book.

I really think that the book would have benefited from either a better author or a better editor. Perhaps both. I wanted to like the book, because the potential subject matter was fascinating, but I ended up learning little. I was glad to put it down when I was finished. ( )

An interesting read about delicate moments of social understanding brought forth from the physical unearthing of a small part of this country's very ugly past.
I enjoyed reading about how a small group of dedicated people of differing ancestry gathered what rescources they had to save an important piece of American history from the brink of certain ruin.
I also enjoyed the author's efforts as a white woman to appricate and honor the cultures of the people buried at Love Cemetery in spite of her own ancestors misdeeds. However I thought the book which started strongly as a historical reference got a little bogged down near the middle by the author's personal feelings.
I would have liked the book to have continued more as a record of history and less as a memoir but that could just be my taste in books, I really can not fault the author for that.
Overall, the book was informative and worth reading if for nothing else, the fact that now I want to learn more. ( )

When China Galland, a white woman, begins researching her ancestry in East Texas, she stumbles across the story of Love Cemetery, an African-American burial ground rendered inaccessible by the timber company that owns the surrounding land. So begins her crusade to help the descendant community regain access to the land where their ancestors are buried, reconsecrate the cemetery and share its story.

I think this book may have been the victim of its jacket copy, which promised an investigation of the lives of freed black slaves in Texas as well as the story of the reclaimed graveyard. I imagined the sort of journalistic history books I love, the kind that weave back and forth between an engaging present narrative and a detailed survey of the historical conditions which spawned it. Instead, although the book offers a few intriguing glimpses at life in post-Reconstruction Texas, the overwhelming focus is on the story of the cemetery, which is not quite gripping enough to justify 240 pages. What makes this book worth reading is Galland's candid acknowledgment of the challenges of modern-day mixed-race friendships. Although the black church community first seems to accept her without reservation, the closer Galland grows to them, the more she sees that the wounds of Jim Crow taint her friendship with older African-Americans. She never tries to offer easy answers and the book's open-ended conclusion does justice to the complexity of the issue.

Bottom line: this is a good book but not a great one. If you are interested in Southern history or modern race relations, you will probably enjoy it, but others shouldn't go out of their way to read it. ( )