Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
One woman’s struggle to restore an old slave cemetery uncovers centuries-old racism
When China Galland visited her childhood hometown in east Texas, she learned of an unmarked cemetery for slaves-Love Cemetery. Her ensuing quest to restore and reclaim the cemetary unearths racial wounds that have never completely healed. Research becomes activism as she organizes a grassroots, interracial committee, made up of local religious leaders and lay people, to work on restoring community access to the cemetery. The author also presents material from the time of slavery and the Reconstruction Era, including stories of “landtakings” (the theft of land from African Americans), and forms of slavery that continued well into the twentieth century. Ultimately Keepers of Love delivers a message of tremendous hope as members of both black and white communities come together to right an historical wrong, and in so doing, discover each other’s common dignity.
“Galland captures the struggle to reclaim one small cemetery in Texas with such engrossing drama and personal detail that the story becomes something larger still-a universal struggle to reclaim the ground of Deep Compassion that lies untended in the human heart.”-Sue Monk Kidd
Related to Love Cemetery
Related ebooks
Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAffrilachian Tales: Folktales from the African-American Appalachian Tradition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBearing Witness to African American Literature: Validating and Valorizing Its Authority, Authenticity, and Agency Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHitting A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack No More Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Folk-Lore of the Sea Islands - South Carolina Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Last Blues Preacher: Reverend Clay Evans, Black Lives, and the Faith that Woke the Nation Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Complexion of Empire in Natchez: Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMaking Black History: The Color Line, Culture, and Race in the Age of Jim Crow Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Liberal Black Protestant Heterosexual Bourgeois Male: From W.E.B. Du Bois to Barack Obama Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "Breath, Eyes, Memory" Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The New Negro Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Including "Ain't I a Woman?" Momentous Speech) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShadows Uplifted Volume I: Black Women Authors of 19th Century American Fiction Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Louisiana: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Allegehing in the United States Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers between the Nation and the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSoulStirrers: Black Art and the Neo-Ancestral Impulse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIsland of Shattered Dreams Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Know the Mother Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Male Frames: African Americans in a Century of Hollywood Cinema, 1903-2003 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsScripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHaunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Negro Folktales Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStories My Grandmother Told Me: A multicultural journey from Harlem to Tohono O'dham Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Social History For You
Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters--And How to Get It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whore Stories: A Revealing History of the World's Oldest Profession Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Three Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Rootworkers & Hoodoo in the Mid-South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A People's History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Far More Terrible for Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsKing, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Renegade History of the United States Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A History of Magic and Witchcraft: Sabbats, Satan & Superstitions in the West Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Untold History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5made in america: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America’s Original Ruling Class Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Love Cemetery
17 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5#unreadshelfproject2020 Really great book. I am enthralled with cemetery research hand this book certainly had that. The restoration of alive Cemetery in Texas is so much more than just the cemetery. Slaves are buried there and their stories along with their ancestors are fascinating. Would love to visit this place someday. “The living are not always with us...and the dead are. It always gone.”
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An interesting read about delicate moments of social understanding brought forth from the physical unearthing of a small part of this country's very ugly past. I enjoyed reading about how a small group of dedicated people of differing ancestry gathered what rescources they had to save an important piece of American history from the brink of certain ruin. I also enjoyed the author's efforts as a white woman to appricate and honor the cultures of the people buried at Love Cemetery in spite of her own ancestors misdeeds. However I thought the book which started strongly as a historical reference got a little bogged down near the middle by the author's personal feelings. I would have liked the book to have continued more as a record of history and less as a memoir but that could just be my taste in books, I really can not fault the author for that. Overall, the book was informative and worth reading if for nothing else, the fact that now I want to learn more.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This wasn't the book that I thought it was going to be when I read the back cover. I was expecting more of a historical exploration of freed slaves in Texas, or perhaps how their descendants were faring, or...something like that. Instead, I got a memoir that really should have been condensed into a few-page article, to be honest.The author hops around everywhere - her own history, antebellum Texas, the Jim Crow laws, land deeds, land theft, the people buried there, their descendants, and her own feelings. Wow, does she spend a lot of time on her own feelings. I swear, she spent more time discussing a misunderstanding she had with one of the descendants than anything else. The author also spends a lot of time talking about her "guilt." I can't remember if her family owned slaves (I am thinking no), but she said that they profited from a world where slavery, and Jim Crow, happened. I honestly don't get why she feels guilty. If SHE were racist, yeah, that's something to be guilty about. But no one is responsible for what their ancestors did. If that were the case, whenever I met a German I would expect them to apologize to me - which I don't. It's one thing to say, "Hey, I'm sorry what my ancestors did to yours." It's another to internalize that and make it your own guilt. Maybe I'm odd, but I don't get it, and I don't get why the author really struggled with it, and it mired down the book.I really think that the book would have benefited from either a better author or a better editor. Perhaps both. I wanted to like the book, because the potential subject matter was fascinating, but I ended up learning little. I was glad to put it down when I was finished.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When China Galland, a white woman, begins researching her ancestry in East Texas, she stumbles across the story of Love Cemetery, an African-American burial ground rendered inaccessible by the timber company that owns the surrounding land. So begins her crusade to help the descendant community regain access to the land where their ancestors are buried, reconsecrate the cemetery and share its story. I think this book may have been the victim of its jacket copy, which promised an investigation of the lives of freed black slaves in Texas as well as the story of the reclaimed graveyard. I imagined the sort of journalistic history books I love, the kind that weave back and forth between an engaging present narrative and a detailed survey of the historical conditions which spawned it. Instead, although the book offers a few intriguing glimpses at life in post-Reconstruction Texas, the overwhelming focus is on the story of the cemetery, which is not quite gripping enough to justify 240 pages. What makes this book worth reading is Galland's candid acknowledgment of the challenges of modern-day mixed-race friendships. Although the black church community first seems to accept her without reservation, the closer Galland grows to them, the more she sees that the wounds of Jim Crow taint her friendship with older African-Americans. She never tries to offer easy answers and the book's open-ended conclusion does justice to the complexity of the issue.Bottom line: this is a good book but not a great one. If you are interested in Southern history or modern race relations, you will probably enjoy it, but others shouldn't go out of their way to read it.