Wow, it's been almost two months since I read Book 20 (The Pharoah Key.) I was reading several magazines and started Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Full disclosure: I haven't picked up Whitman in a while.
My mother-in-law gave me Slaves in the Family as she was packing to move to North Carolina. Edward Ball researches two-hundred years of his family papers, state and national governmental records, and works of historians. He also tracks down descendants of persons his family enslaved and uses their oral histories to build upon his research.
Ball is a good writer and an excellent researcher. His work illuminates an important part of US history that many prefer to ignore or dismiss.
In an epilogue, he travels to Bunce Island in Sierra Leone and meets descendants of some slave sellers. Ball and some of the descendants take part in a ceremony to ask forgiveness of the dead. According to the traditions of the ritual, their prayers were accepted.
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