Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879

Alexander, Adele Logan

ISBN 10: 1557282145 / ISBN 13: 9781557282149

Published by The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1991

About this Item

Second Printing of 1991 copyright. Inscribed, signed and dated by author on half title page. Book is clean and tight. Dust Jacket in protective cover. 268 pages with index.

Seller Inventory # 002834

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879
• Publisher: The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Arkansas
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557282145
• ISBN 13: 9781557282149
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 2nd Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Signed By Author
  • United States History

About this title

Synopsis

In this groundbreaking study, Alexander chronicles the previously undocumented plight of perhaps the most marginal sector of 19th-century American society--the free women of mixed race in the rural South. Although the book focuses on the women of Alexander's own family, it is a fascinating profile of America, its race and gender relations, and its complex cultural weave. (Univ. of Arkansas Press)

Reviews

As Alexander confesses at the outset, hers is a family history more than a sociological or historical essay. In trying to recover the lives of the coterie of mixed-race women (and men) of middle Georgia, she embarks on a personal journey to her own Cherokee, black, and white forebears. She finds that the small, rural, mixed-race families were neither black nor white, sharing allegiances and characteristics of both races with whom they lived in often intimate contact. She gives a fascinating account of life inside "the big house" on the Sayre plantation, reminding us of the countless complex ways whites and blacks interacted. Her vivid, if somewhat exaggerated, recounting of heretofore forgotten people lacks the sophistication of Gary B. Mills's The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color ( LJ 7/77), about a Louisiana family, or the sweep of Joel Williamson's New People ( LJ 9/15/80), and her findings are hardly news. Still, the story compels. For university libraries.
- Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.