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Book Excerpts
Biographies |
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 The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship 2005, Edited and with an Introduction by Michele Valerie Ronnick, Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. African American Life Series, Wayne State University Press This is a study in transgression and transcendence. It is the self-portrait of a black man born in slavery who broke through a nexus of biased cultural assumption to reach the self-actuated state of full personhood. It is the story of a man who experienced his “first” liberation through the cultivation of his own intellect at a time when education for members of his race was interdicted by law. And finally, it is a blow-by-blow account of his heroic struggle to rise above seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to stand upright in the formal dress of civilized life with his humanity authenticated ... MORE   The Blind African Slave or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, As Told to Benjamin F. Prentiss, Esq. 2004, Edited and with an introduction by Kari J. Winter. University of Wisconsin Press In 1810 in St. Albans, Vermont, a small town near the Canadian border, a narrative of slavery was published by an obscure printer. Entitled The Blind African Slave or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, it was greeted with no fanfare, and it has remained for nearly two hundred years a faint spectre in our cultural memory. Boyrereau Brinch/Jeffrey Brace was captured around 1758 during a festive afternoon when he and thirteen of his friends went swimming in a river. When they got out of the water, they were surrounded by white men with dogs who succeeded in capturing eleven of them. One moment he and his friends were engaged in a "delightful sport;" moments later they were bound, gagged, and "fastened down in the boat," surrounded by "a horrid stench." ... MORE |
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