Description

Published some thirty years ago Robert Manson Myerss Children of Pride won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on Americas slaveholding South That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones 18041863 whose family owned more than a hundred slaves While extensive these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in Georgia In this remarkable book the religious historian Erskine Clarke completes the story offering a narrative history of four generations of the plantations inhabitants white and black Encompassing the years 1805 to 1869 Dwelling Place describes the simultaneous but vastly different experiences of slave and slave owner This upstairsdownstairs history reveals in detail how the benevolent impulses of Jones and his family became ideological supports for deep oppression and how the slave Lizzy Jones and members of her family struggled against oppression

Through letters plantation and church records court documents slave narratives archaeological findings and the memory of the African American community Clarke brings to light the longsuppressed history of the slaves of the Jones plantationsa history inseparably bound to that of their white owners