Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom

"A searing metaphorical X-ray of a people battling to find space where they can become themselves. . . . I am deeply grateful for McFeely's magnificent effort of thought, empathy, scholarship and imagination." Roger Wilkins, Los Angeles Times Book Review (front-page review)

In this moving and original work, William S. McFeely, one of this country's most distinguished historians, retells the history and enters into the current-day lives of the people who inhabit Sapelo's Island off the coast of Georgia, descendants of slaves who once worked its huge cotton plantations. It is at once a richly detailed work of historical reconstruction, a sensitive portrait of the lives of black Americans in this particular place and in our own time, and a moving meditation on race by a writer who has made its painful dilemmas his life's work as a historian.