High Cotton: Maafa

High Cotton chronicles the life of a 12 year old boy, his kidnapping, and being sold into slavery. He suffered torture and abuse and witnessed horrible events prior to and during his journey via slave trader ship to America. He was auctioned to a plantation and eventually emancipated. He returns to the sea aboard the same ship he arrived on, and remains until the death of the ships Captain. Left a substantial amount of money by the Captain only to be conned by a carpetbagger, he looses everything and ends up a beggar on the streets of St. Louis. A very talented entertainer, even though a black man in a society of white aristocracy, he gains popularity and becomes an owner of a night club and faces adversity on every hand.

Having been an avid history buff for most of my life I have uttered the statement "I should write a book." Making my dream come true, I wrote and published my first book entitled "King of the Mountain," a novel of the lives of my ancestors prior to and culminating in the Battle of Kings Mountain. I found that to be quite satisfying and determined to write a second book, and hopefully a third, and so on. My second book, "High Cotton" chronicles the lives of a 12 year old boy, Manni, and his younger brother, Jalani. The boys were kidnapped from their village in West Africa by Yoruba warriors and sold to Dutch slave traders.The abuse and the torture these boys and many others have suffered, is referred to as the Maafa, or the African holocaust. Maafa is a Kiswahili term meaning disaster, terrible occurrence, or great tragedy. The courage and strength to survive in these circumstances indwells in the human spirit, the spirit to endure and overcome. "High Cotton" describes some of the brutal actions perpetrated upon the African people, and then exposes the spirit to endure and overcome.