It feels strange to look back into the past and feel heartbreak for people's suffering, and all they did without, when they are long gone and there is nothing left to be done about their want or need. But I cannot always help myself, and that is how I felt when I read these words from a tenant farmer in Martin County, N.C. in 1887.
Bladen County N.C.
“I Cannot Write My Life”
Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst's new book "I Cannot Write My Life" reveals the Islamic and Arabic literary traditions of West Africa that shaped Omar ibn Said, the Muslim scholar who was enslaved on the North Carolina coast from 1807 until his death in 1863.
David Cecelski 