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. ( )

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. ( )