Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom [Paperback]

Louis Hughes was born a slave in Virginia and at age 12 was sold away from his mother, whom he never saw again. After a few interim owners, he was sold to a wealthy slaveowner who had a home near Memphis and plantation nearby in Mississippi. Hughes lived there as a house servant until near the end of the Civil War, when he escaped to the Union lines and then, in a daring adventure with the paid help of two Union soldiers, returned to the plantation for his wife. The couple made their way to Canada and after the war to Chicago and Detroit, eventually settling in Milwaukee. There Hughes became relatively comfortable as a hotel attendant and as an entrepreneur laundry operator. Self-educated and eloquent, Hughes wrote and privately published this memoir in 1897. It is a compelling account, by turns searing and compassionate about slavery, slaves, and slaveowners. No reader can be unmoved as Hughes tells about his five attempts to escape, about having to stand by helplessly while watching his wife whipped, of the joy of finally meeting again the brother whom he had not seen since they were little children in Virginia. Yet he also writes knowingly about the economics of slavery and the day-to-day business of the plantation, and the glass-house relationships between slaves and masters. Hughes died in Milwaukee in 1913. The re-publication of Louis Hughes' Thirty Years A Slave is a remarkable achievement. Randall Williams' introduction places this classic work in the proper context for all new readers. Riveting, powerful, this a must read for those who seek to understand contemporary America. Molefi Kete Asante, author of The Afrocentric Idea, and 51 other books
Thirty Years a Slave offers one of the most detailed first-hand descriptions of slavery available in the entire slave narrative tradition. In his under-appreciated autobiography, Louis Hughes accomplishes the remarkable literary feat of recording with equal conviction both the injustices of slavery and the caplCĪ