From 2014:
In this small book are tales of slavery told by the slaves themselves. Tales of heartache and pain and subjugation that I never read in any of my history books. Slavery is awful and that is something that I've always felt in my bones but reading what they went through, in their own words with just the narrative of Julius Lester to weave the tales together is gutwrenching. Families broken apart we knew but infants torn from their mother's breast to later be drowned. The absolute lack of any type of compassion for another living thing, much less another human being. How the horses were cared for better than the people. To hear of the beatings in their own words. Even after reading this I can't imagine how so many endured it for so long and my heart breaks for what they went through and for those around the world today that are still not free. While this is written as a children's book, I do find the subject matter to be very heavy and am glad that our curriculum did not include this until high school but I definitely feel that it is a book that everyone should read to better understand the history of our nation from the side that wasn't in charge.
Page count: 160p/6,136p ytd/317,341p lifetime
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