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A review by librarianonparade
Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery by Heather Andrea Williams
4.0
This book focuses on one of the most inhuman and heart wrenching aspects of American slavery - the destruction of families through sale, the separation of husbands from wives, mothers from children, brothers and sisters from one another, often never to be seen again. It's an aspect of slavery that almost every book on the period touches on, but to read an entire study devoted to the topic makes for painful reading.
Williams breaks her study into three, the first section focusing on the separation itself, the second on the search for family members, both during slavery and after its end, and finally on the lucky few who succeeded in reuniting their families. Her narrative draws up on letters and memoirs, lectures, newspaper ads, late in life interviews and memories from descendants. Reading these tales of loss and grief in the words of those affected makes this an incredibly powerful read, so much more than many histories of slavery and the Civil War that focus on facts and high-powered events and individuals and neglect the emotional context. As Williams notes in her introduction, the entire story of American slavery is one of emotion - of love and loneliness, despair and grief, hope, joy, anger, resentment, determination.
This book doesn't neglect the other side of the tale - the deliberate decisions of white slaveowners to sell their slaves, to break up families, to ignore the powerful bonds of motherhood and kinship. Some acknowledged the emotions of their slaves and were stricken with guilt and shame, yet still their own financial or familial priorities took precedence. Others were utterly unconcerned, incapable of recognising any common humanity in the slaves and convinced that slaves could not feel as deeply as white men and women.
Exploring emotions, as Williams acknowledges, is always a perilous task, particularly the emotions of a people who learned through a great many years of brutality and violence to shield their thoughts and feelings, to mask their pain, to play a role to ensure their own survival. Add in the difficulty of retrieving these individuals from the historical record - for every letter or memoir or interview there must be hundreds and thousands of men, women and children who have been lost to history - and the very concept of this book becomes daunting. But something like this needed to be written, and I could only wish it had been longer, that there was more to learn about these people. To read about a mother's search for her children and never to know the outcome, a husband's hunt for his wife long lost to him forever unknown - it's heartbreaking reading. You hope and pray for a joyful ending for these people, as they must have hoped and prayed themselves, but knowing too that hope is often the cruellest emotion.
Williams breaks her study into three, the first section focusing on the separation itself, the second on the search for family members, both during slavery and after its end, and finally on the lucky few who succeeded in reuniting their families. Her narrative draws up on letters and memoirs, lectures, newspaper ads, late in life interviews and memories from descendants. Reading these tales of loss and grief in the words of those affected makes this an incredibly powerful read, so much more than many histories of slavery and the Civil War that focus on facts and high-powered events and individuals and neglect the emotional context. As Williams notes in her introduction, the entire story of American slavery is one of emotion - of love and loneliness, despair and grief, hope, joy, anger, resentment, determination.
This book doesn't neglect the other side of the tale - the deliberate decisions of white slaveowners to sell their slaves, to break up families, to ignore the powerful bonds of motherhood and kinship. Some acknowledged the emotions of their slaves and were stricken with guilt and shame, yet still their own financial or familial priorities took precedence. Others were utterly unconcerned, incapable of recognising any common humanity in the slaves and convinced that slaves could not feel as deeply as white men and women.
Exploring emotions, as Williams acknowledges, is always a perilous task, particularly the emotions of a people who learned through a great many years of brutality and violence to shield their thoughts and feelings, to mask their pain, to play a role to ensure their own survival. Add in the difficulty of retrieving these individuals from the historical record - for every letter or memoir or interview there must be hundreds and thousands of men, women and children who have been lost to history - and the very concept of this book becomes daunting. But something like this needed to be written, and I could only wish it had been longer, that there was more to learn about these people. To read about a mother's search for her children and never to know the outcome, a husband's hunt for his wife long lost to him forever unknown - it's heartbreaking reading. You hope and pray for a joyful ending for these people, as they must have hoped and prayed themselves, but knowing too that hope is often the cruellest emotion.