In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...

"A novel in verse about a boy escaping slavers during the nineteenth century"--

You are a slave in the 1850s, trying to escape your harsh life, or you are a slave catsher hoping to get rich catching escaped slaves, or you are part of the Underground Railroad helping slaves escape to freedom. Everything in this book happened to real people, and you choose which side you're on and what to do next.

They call themselves the Stolen. Their owners call them captives. They are taught their captors' tongues and their beliefs but they have a language and rituals all their own. In a world that would be allegorical if it weren't saturated in harsh truths, Cato and William meet at Placid Hall, a plantation in an unspecified part of the American South. Subject to the whims of their tyrannical and eccentric captor, Cannonball Greene, they never know what...

Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Grace--a.k.a "Momma Grace" will live a long, wondrous life marked by hardship, oppression, opportunity, and love. Though she will be "gifted" various names, her birth name is known to her alone. Over the course of 100-plus years, she survives capture, enslavement by several property owners, the Atlantic crossing when she is only eleven years of age, and a brief stint as a pirate's...

It’s 1855, and the Dickinson farm, in the bottom corner of Virginia, is already in debt when a Northern abolitionist arrives and creates havoc among the slaves. Determined to find his mother and daughter, who are already free in Canada, Bry is the first slave to flee, and his escape inspires a dozen others. Soon, the farm, owned by one brother and managed by another, is forfeited to the bank. One of the brothers, who is also a circuit-riding preacher,...

Philadelphia, 1825. Five young, free black boys are lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay. They are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal shines a spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad,...

"From the revered historian-winner of nearly every award given in his field-the long-awaited conclusion of his magisterial three-volume history of slavery in Western culture that has been more than fifty years in the making. David Brion Davis is one of the foremost historians of our time, and in this final volume in his monumental trilogy on slavery in Western culture he offers highly original, authoritative, and penetrating insight into what slavery...