Description
"Ninety-Six Stages on the River" is a memoir that explores the mingled ancestral bloodlines of a personal family history (African, Amerindian, and European) as well as the landscape of the family farm purchased after the Emancipation in the foothills of the southern Appalachians. It pierces the veil drawn before that Wendell Berry called "the hidden wound," the generational damage inflicted upon the land and across racial lines by plantation slavery and Jim Crow. It speaks into the silences wrought by violence, loss, and (dis)possession while speaking for a landscape wounded by the ruinous cycles of tobacco, cotton, and corn, but whose sufferings it is within our power to relieve.
