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A review by sam_k_
The Weeping Time by Anne C. Bailey
4.0
There’s actually a story behind me picking up this book. In 2020 I read an article about a woman who was touring one of the Louisiana plantations and noticed that there wasn’t even a mention of slavery during the entire tour despite the fact that they were touring a plantation which depended on exploited slave labor to develop. She started digging into the history of the specific plantation location she toured and found that it hid an especially dark history that just wasn’t talked about.
I wanted to do some exploring of my own because I know there’s a lot of fucked up history that isn’t talked about and I wanted to learn more about it so that I could know about it and develop a better, more complex understanding of the United States.
This book was really interesting: definitely a traumatic read, especially if this is something that is triggering or personal to you, but I thought the storytelling was both thoughtful and really well researched. I feel like a lot of books forsake one for the other, but this book in my opinion did a masterful job of humanizing the experiences of the many slaves’s lives explored in the work as well as combining elements from memoirs and history to place it in a broader context of American history.
I liked the formatting, too. It was chronological and focused not only on harm but also on repair, the latter of which I think is a crucial piece that many books and pieces of media focusing on slavery overlook. It also focused a lot on the African cultures and languages and faith that the slaves from the Butler plantation inherited from their African ancestors and I really liked tracing those parts of their lives.
Honestly the only reason this book isn’t five stars is because it was a bit hard for me to read. It doesn’t diminish the quality of the book at all, it’s more of a personal-to-me thing.
I wanted to do some exploring of my own because I know there’s a lot of fucked up history that isn’t talked about and I wanted to learn more about it so that I could know about it and develop a better, more complex understanding of the United States.
This book was really interesting: definitely a traumatic read, especially if this is something that is triggering or personal to you, but I thought the storytelling was both thoughtful and really well researched. I feel like a lot of books forsake one for the other, but this book in my opinion did a masterful job of humanizing the experiences of the many slaves’s lives explored in the work as well as combining elements from memoirs and history to place it in a broader context of American history.
I liked the formatting, too. It was chronological and focused not only on harm but also on repair, the latter of which I think is a crucial piece that many books and pieces of media focusing on slavery overlook. It also focused a lot on the African cultures and languages and faith that the slaves from the Butler plantation inherited from their African ancestors and I really liked tracing those parts of their lives.
Honestly the only reason this book isn’t five stars is because it was a bit hard for me to read. It doesn’t diminish the quality of the book at all, it’s more of a personal-to-me thing.