1-58838-091-2
5 3/8" x 8
3/8"
$15.95 paperback
158 pages
index
NewSouth Books
|
In this absorbing account,
first published in 1897, Hughes describes mundane yet evocative pieces
of everyday life....and astonishing events like his numerous attempts to
escape bondage and his subsequent recapture. He writes with subtlety
about his “masters” hypocrisy... Reflective moments like this make
the re-publication of this memoir very welcome.
—Publishers Weekly
Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom is not just a story of
one man’s vicissitudes of life, but a pictorial account of life in
bondage that ultimately shaped a determined people...a vibrant story
that can only shed more light on the darkest days of servitude.
—Tri-State Defender
Hughes’s autobiography is richly filled with the details of
plantation culture and slave life, from the making of clothes to a
variety of religious services.
—The Commercial Appeal
From the moment I opened Louis Hughes'Thirty Years a Slave, I
could not put it down. Every page brought surprises and revelations,
giving life to America's haunted past.
—Richard Poe, author of Black Spark, White Fire
Louis Hughes' narrative is one of the most informative, insightful,
and hopeful accounts of how Americans of color created their own freedom
in the midst of a slave society.
—Richard Newman, Senior Research Officer W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for
Afro-American Research, Harvard University
The re-publication of Louis Hughes' Thirty Years A Slave is a
remarkable achievement. Randall Williams' introduction places this
classic work in the proper context for all new readers. Riveting,
powerful, this a must read for those who seek to understand contemporary
America.
—Molefi Kete Asante, Professor and author of The Afrocentric Idea and
51 other books
Thirty Years a Slave offers one of the most detailed first-hand
descriptions of slavery available in the entire slave narrative
tradition. In his under-appreciated autobiography, Louis Hughes
accomplishes the remarkable literary feat of recording with equal
conviction both the injustices of slavery and the capacities of African
Americans, while enduring enslavement, to resist demoralization and
victimhood.
—William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English UNC-Chapel
Hill
In Hughes, you see the human strength and spirit to endure and our
inextinguishable desire for freedom...Hughes has given us a historical
and social gem.
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Louis Hughes was born a slave in Virginia and at age twelve was sold
away from his mother, whom he never saw again. After a few interim
owners, he was sold to a wealthy slave owner and taken to
Mississippi. Hughes was a house servant until near the end of the
Civil War, when he escaped and then, in a daring adventure with the paid
help of two Union soldiers, returned to the plantation for his
wife. The couple made their way to Canada and after the war to
Chicago and Detroit, eventually settling in Milwaukee. There
Hughes became relatively comfortable as a hotel attendant and as an
entrepreneur laundry operator. Self-educated and eloquent, Hughes
wrote and privately published his memoir in 1897. It is a
compelling account, by turns searing and compassionate, about slavery,
slaves, and slave owners. No reader can be unmoved as Hughes tells
about his five attempts to escape, about having to stand by helplessly
while watching his wife whipped, of the joy of finally meeting again the
brother whom he had not seen since they were children in Virginia.
Yet he also writes knowingly about the economics of slavery and the
day-to-day business of the plantation, and the glass-house relationships
between slaves and master. Hughes died in Milwaukee in 1913.
This edition edition includes a new foreword by William L. Andrews, the
E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
