Fleming Community Library

The moving abolitionist novel that fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852 and melodramatically condemned the institution of slavery through such powerfully realized characters as Tom, Eliza, Topsy, Eva, and Simon Legree. First published more than 150 years ago, this monumental work is today being reexamined by critics, scholars, and students.

"Let us descend,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world.'" --Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver...

Ohio 1850. For a modest English Quaker stranded far from home, life is a trial. Untethered from the moment she leaves England, fleeing personal disappointment, Honor Bright is forced by family tragedy to rely on strangers in an alien, untamed landscape. The men sweat and spit; the women drink whiskey and shoot copperheads, even as they stitch bonnets and quilts. Nineteenth-century America is practical, precarious, and scarred by the continuing injustice...

Fourteen-year-old Sarah is a slave in Maryland during the 1850's. She knows her only chance at freedom is to the North, where slavery is illegal. To get there, though, Sarah needs help from members of the Underground Railroad. But who can she trust? The road to the promised land will not be easy.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father...

After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the...

Classic Slave Narratives 2 is a collection of fictional slave narratives designed with the proposed thoughts of slaves rarely detailed. These underlying remnants of slave reactions to slavery were in every slave from Harriet Tubman to Nat Turner. How can we best deal with this peculiar institution is a thought every slave subjugated to human bondage must have given some thought to. Let us envision and examine their reactions in lieu of a few different...

Oney Judge, having been a loyal servant to Martha Washington for twenty years, comes to the realization that she is just a slave and must decide if she will run away to find true freedom.

"Addy Walker's family is planning a dangerous escape from slavery during the summer of 1864. But before they can leave, the most terrible thing Addy can imagine happens -- her Poppa and her brother, Sam, are sold! Addy and her Momma decide they must head out on their own. Although the road to freedom is difficult, Addy's new life brings new friends, school, and even the opportunity to help others. But when will her family be reunited?"--

"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath...