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Things past telling : a novel  Cover Image Book Book

Things past telling : a novel / Sheila Williams.

Summary:

"Things Past Telling is a remarkable historical epic that charts one unforgettable woman's journey across an ocean of years as vast as the Atlantic that will forever separate her from her homeland. Born in West Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, Maryam Prescilla Grace--a.k.a "Momma Grace" will live a long, wondrous life marked by hardship, oppression, opportunity, and love. Though she will be "gifted" various names, her birth name is known to her alone. Over the course of 100-plus years, she survives capture, enslavement by several property owners, the Atlantic crossing when she is only eleven years of age, and a brief stint as a pirate's ward, acting as both a spy and a translator. Maryam learns midwifery from a Caribbean-born wise woman, whose "craft" combines curated techniques and medicines from African, Indigenous, and European women. Those midwifery skills allow her to sometimes transcend the racial and class barriers of her enslavement, as she walks the razor's edge trying to balance the lives and health of her own people with the cruel economic mandates of the slave holders, who view infants born in bondage not as flesh-and-blood children but as investment property. Throughout her triumphant and tumultuous life Maryam gains and loses her homeland, her family, her culture, her husband, her lovers, and her children. Yet as the decades pass, this tenacious woman never loses her sense of self. Inspired by a 112-year-old woman the author discovered in an 1870 U.S. Federal census report for Ohio, loosely based on the author's real-life female ancestors, spanning more than a hundred years, from the mid-eighteen-century to the end of America's Civil War, and spanning across the globe, from what is now southern Nigeria to the islands of the Caribbean to North America and the land bordering the Ohio River, Things Past Telling is a breathtaking story of a past that lives on in all of us, and a life that encompasses the best--and worst--of our humanity."-- Publisher's website.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9780063097070 (hardcover)
  • Physical Description: 339 pages ; 24 cm
  • Edition: First edition.
  • Publisher: New York, NY : Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, [2022]
Subject: African American women > Fiction.
African Americans > Fiction.
Midwives > Fiction.
Slaves > Fiction.
Women > Fiction.
Genre: Historical fiction.
Novels.
Epic fiction.

Available copies

  • 1 of 1 copy available at Tsuga Consortium.

Holds

  • 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Show All Copies
Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Cookstown Branch FIC Willi 31681010268563 FICTION Available -


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