Description

pp. [9] 274. B&W photos throughout text. This is the first printing of the first edition. “By the eve of the Civil War, there were four million slaves in North America, and Harrison County was the largest slave-owning county in Texas. So when China Galland returned to research her family history there, it should not have surprised her to learn of unmarked cemeteries for slaves. “My daddy never let anybody plow this end of the field,” a local matron told a startled Galland during a visit to her antebellum mansion. “The slaves are buried there.” Galland’s subsequent effort to help restore just one of these cemeteries—Love Cemetery—unearths a quintessential American story of prejudice, land theft, and environmental destruction, uncovering racial wounds that are slow to heal. // […] // By telling this one story of ultimate interracial and intergenerational cooperation, Galland provides a model of the kind of communal remembering and reconciliation that can begin to heal the deep racial scars of an entire nation.”