Through Their Eyes: Roots In Iron: VOLUME 1

By MARVIN E. MANSFIELD

In August 1619, a woman named Ngozi was taken from the Kingdom of Ndongo, carried across the Atlantic in the hold of a stolen ship, and traded for food at Point Comfort, Virginia. She knelt in the soil of a land she had not chosen and spoke her name in Kimbundu, and the speaking was the first act of a story that would span two hundred and forty-six years. Roots in Iron tells that story - not as a march of dates and legislation, but through the eyes of the people who lived it: a free Black couple who built a farm on the Eastern Shore and watched the law dismantle everything they had; a nineteen-year-old man who knew rice and had his knowledge stolen on a Carolina plantation; a blacksmith in Charleston whose daughter was sold to settle a debt and who received, six months later, a letter containing two words; a woman who ran a boardinghouse in Philadelphia and read Frederick Douglass aloud to neighbors who could not read; a soldier who charged across the sand at Fort Wagner and wrote home about the morning glories growing near the graves. From the Middle Passage to the cotton field, from the auction block to the praise house, from Nat Turner's fire to Harriet Tubman's gunboats on the Combahee River, this first volume of the Through Their Eyes series follows the men, women, and children - enslaved and free, old and young, at work and at prayer - whose lives built the foundation of Black America. Their names were not always recorded. Their stories were carried in the mouth, in the memory, in the song. This book is an attempt to hear them. Volume I of the five-volume series Through Their Eyes: Four Centuries of African-American Life, by Marvin E. Mansfield.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GRJFHBKZ
• ISBN13: 9798250957663
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"