In Search of the Promised Land. book by John Hope Franklin, Loren Schweninger

Ebony, August, 2005

IN SEARCH OF THE PROMISED LAND: A SLAVE FAMILY IN THE OLD SOUTH (Oxford University Press, $23), by noted historian John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, tells the true story of one family's march toward freedom.

The story begins with Sally Thomas, the matriarch, who went from serving as a slave on a tobacco plantation in Virginia to becoming a so-called "virtually-free" slave who went on to run her own business of cleaning fine apparel in Nashville, Tenn. She even earned enough money to buy one of her sons, James Thomas, out of slavery. "Born in the year of the Constitutional Convention, Sally was about 30 years old when she made the journey to Tennessee" the book reads in part. "She had grown up on Charles Thomas's 1,596-acre tobacco plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia, situated on the north side of the north fork of the Hardware River. She had lived near Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and heard stories about her famous neighbor. She may have even heard that Jefferson was the father of several children by one of his slaves, also named Sally."

The book is based, in part, on the unfinished manuscript of Sally Thomas's son, James, whose pages landed in the hands of John Hope Franklin, professor Emeritus at Duke University and a world-renowned African-American historian. The finding led Franklin and his writing partner, Schweninger, to delve into the shaky bridge between freedom and slavery in the Old South. Schweninger is Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor and Director of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Thomas apparently penned the manuscript after his children persuaded him to write recollections of his childhood, paving the way for what has become one of the most revealing autobiographies written by a former slave. Besides the manuscript, Franklin and Schweninger reviewed scores of letters and recollections gathered from various members of the Thomas-Rapier family of Nashville in this gripping story of a family's journey through time.