Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery
By: Heather Andrea Williams / Narrated By: Robin Miles
Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
If you ever thought you knew about the evils of slavery? You have NO idea—here we go
Black History Month has really opened my eyes; I’ve enjoyed it very much even tho’ I must say that a lot of what I’ve been listening to has been tough to hear. When I remember audiobooks like When They Call You A Terrorist, I can see how very far we have to go as a society.
And after listening to Help Me to Find My People, I am incredibly saddened by how we as a society took so much and continue to give so little.
Help Me to Find My People is absolutely gut-wrenching. It’s about families torn apart by slavery, by the selling off of individuals like so many sacks of cloth. It’s rather a scholarly work, but it’s such an emotion-packed journey that it’s riveting. Williams divides it into separate sections, relying on letters, narratives, newspaper articles, newspaper ads of the time, things of that ilk, that tell the stories of children sold from their families, parents sold from their children, spouses sold from each other, and the final section is post-Civil War advertisements of ex-slaves desperately looking for lost families. The latter is mostly the ads in newspapers at the times, with requests that their stories be told by ministers to their congregations. One would think that the rote reading of ads for an hour would make for tedium at worst, overkill at best, but it winds up being absolutely heartbreaking. Especially when you hear the dates of the ads: Individuals kept up their attempts for years, decades even, after the fact.
It also looks into the social difficulties that slavery produced. Men and women could not be married legally (indeed, one slave owner substituted his own name for “God” as he officiated a union) as they were property; they didn’t own themselves, how could they cleave unto another when they could be sold at any minute. Thus, when torn apart, they grieved, but sometimes “remarried”, and after Emancipation and the war, whom would they look for?
There are many instances of this dilemma that are pondered, and literature of the time is often cited (note: Mark Twain and such all). Then too, there are instances of children who cling to their “Mammy”, the one who “adopted” the child as a babe, even as their real mothers try to reunite with them. Indeed, early histories post-Slavery often proclaimed that Negroes were numbed through hardship and couldn’t reunite because, actually, they felt less than white people would (whites being unused to hardship and deprivation).
This all can make for brutal listening at times, Help Me to Find My People is nothing if not a humane and honoring book. Robin Miles, veteran narrator, brings life to each individual, be they uneducated, be they urbane. She has a smooth voice that gets throaty with emotion when called for—a very captivating performance.
I strongly recommend this audiobook for a look at Slavery through the eyes of the people who lived it and who still loved. Whether hope was a good thing or not remains inconclusive, and whether love was a hindrance or a help could be just as twitchy a concept. But hope and love were all they had. And they clung to it, clung to each other mightily. Really, a great audiobook, even if it did fill me with despair by the end.
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