Sapelo's People

"A searing metaphorical X-ray of a people battling to find space where they can become themselves. . . . I am deeply grateful for McFeely's magnificent effort of thought, empathy, scholarship and imagination." —Roger Wilkins, Los Angeles Times Book Review (front-page review)

In this moving and original work, William S. McFeely, one of this country's most distinguished historians, retells the history—and enters into the current-day lives—of the people who inhabit Sapelo's Island off the coast of Georgia, descendants of slaves who once worked its huge cotton plantations. It is at once a richly detailed work of historical reconstruction, a sensitive portrait of the lives of black Americans in this particular place and in our own time, and a moving meditation on race by a writer who has made its painful dilemmas his life's work as a historian.

"Raising historical writing to the level of art, McFeely tells with genuine respect an urgent and important story." —Benjamin Griffith, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The story of Sapelo's past is both a wonderful and a terrible one and McFeely tells it splendidly. . . . It is a noble story. It warms the heart. We learn from it another possibility of being human." —Bill Holm, Hungry Mind Review

William S. McFeely, Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities at the University of Georgia, is the author of Yankee Stepfather, Grant: A Biography (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Frederick Douglass. He lives in Athens, Georgia, and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

1995 / paperback /ISBN 0-393-31377-8 / 208 pages / HISTORY

• "As an idiosyncratic attempt to capture something of what it has been like to be an American, and to be human, over the last two centuries, Sapelo's People is a marvelous text." —Melissa Fay Greene, Boston Globe
• Also available: Grant ISBN 0-393-30046-3; Yankee Stepfather ISBN 0-393-31178-3