Description
Book SynopsisMajor literary figure and ';master of language' (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman uses his unique generational perspective to explore what he calls the ';slaveroad,' a daunting, haunting reality that runs throughout American history.John Edgar Wideman's ';slaveroad' is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists.
In a section of ';Slaveroad,' called ';Sheppard', William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians, travels back to Africa where he works as a missionary, converting Africans to Christianity alongside his Southern white col
