James Island: Stories from Slave Descendants

By Eugene Frazier

Book Overview

This South Carolina sea island, which once flourished and folded under the bondage of slavery, is now a place where all races live and celebrate its rich heritage.

Today, James Island is a bustling community seven miles west of Charleston, South Carolina, but the island's past wasn't always something you'd see on a billboard to entice you to visit. Beginning in the 18th century, James Island was the destination for hundreds of enslaved Africans who were tortured with unimaginable hardships while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. In James Island: Stories from Slave Descendants, Eugene Frazier Sr. compiles narrative interviews from firsthand accounts with slaves and their descendants, as well as the descendants of plantation owners. The stories Frazier gathered give us a singular perspective on the lives of African Americans from 1732-1950, following the James Island community for more than 130 years of slavery to decades of sharecropping and farming while slavery's long shadow survived in segregation. An excellent resource for historians, teachers or those interested in the journey from slavery to integration, James Island: Stories from Slave Descendantswill be an enlightening and meaningful addition to any library.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1596291826
• ISBN13: 9781596291829
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: History Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.4" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Folklore and Black History fans will enjoy

Eugene Frazier Sr. was a pioneering Black policeman who wrote a book about his experiences in that position a few years ago that was locally published. Here, the turns his pen to his hometown, the once-rural James Island section of Charleston, SC and the descendants of those who were slaves there. He collected these oral histories from the Island elders (including many of his relatives) from 1942 to 2005. Some readers may be put off the the extensive use of family trees and chornology in the book as a bit cumbersome, but this is a minor detail. The stories and folktales themselves, often phonetically in the region's Gullah dialect, perform an excellent source of previously unwritten tales of rural Black life. One heartbreaking story involves an enslaved lady who searched for her brother who was sold away for the rest of ther life. Others deal with occuparion by the Union Army, Jim Crow society, and other aspects unique to the area such as a brief anecdote about Samuel Smalls (the handicapped beggar who inspired "Porgy and Bess") and another about a slave who was asked to join the Denmark Vesey slave rebellion in Charleston. Frazier also names names in stories about white men who oppressed blacks and had children by enslaved women-a still-touchy topic in these parts. Overall, you may want to read this in intervals, but it makes for excellent reading and the telling of untold stories.