nonfiction/Black history post-civil war, with clues taken from Federal Writers Project interviews with the formerly enslaved (frequent uncertainty over who one's parents are and creating new communities and lives in the aftermath), written by a white associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo.

Provides a more complete picture of what people's experiences were, though the main FWP information source is far from perfect, as the author notes in the prologue, since Blacks were not likely to be very comfortable expressing the whole truth to a white interviewer in the 1930s, and even when a Black interviewer was present, as in Ms. Joyner's case, the copies of the transcript has been edited by people with their own agendas and cannot be wholly verified. However, Emberton does a pretty thorough job in researching and analyzing the available information (supplemented with Census, death records, marriage records and records of other formerly enslaved peoples' testimonies) to provide as complete a picture as possible.

See also: Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Dark Sky Rising for more about Jim Crow conditions of the south, Nora Zeale Hurston's Barracoon for an oral history carefully collected from another enslaved person, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns for more about families choosing to migrate away from the south, and Morgan Jenkins' Wandering in Strange Lands for another author's incomplete search for her family roots and the inherited trauma therein. ( )