LEGACY OF FREEDOM
By Karen S. Gardner and Mike Robinson

Highland Press - October 2000
ISBN 0967883210 - Trade Paperback
Fiction / Historical

Reviewed by: Jo Rogers, MyShelf.Com
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Legacy of Freedom, though a work of fiction, is a compelling story of one woman's life and quest for something better for her children.  This story could easily have been a biography, and indeed, the authors did a lot of research to make it that way.  It is the story of Delilah Smith and her trek from the miseries of slavery to the lap of luxury and freedom.

The story begins when Delilah's great-great granddaughter, Sophie Smith, a sociology major in college, is assigned a paper to write on the effects of a major event on families.  Knowing her great-great grandparents had been slaves and had lived when the Emancipation Proclamation was made, she sought out her grandfather, Frederick Douglass Smith, to ask questions.  She had planned on the interview taking an hour or so.  But this interview would last four days, fill eight hours of audio tapes, pages of handwritten notes, and the information would occupy the next ten years of her life.  For the story Frederick Smith had to tell covered an entire lifetime.

Delilah had seldom spoken of the years she had been a slave in South Carolina.  It was something none of the former slaves ever talked about, not even to each other, not even between husband and wife.  But the day Frederick had gotten married, his grandmother had taken him to one side and begun to talk of her past.  He had intended to go right back in to dance at the reception, but she spoke with an urgency that made him think he might not have another chance to hear it.  Soon, he was so engrossed, all else was forgotten but the history being poured out before him.

Delilah did not know what her mother's name was.  She just barely remembered her face.  In those days, after the ban on importing new slaves was passed, slave owners "made do" by breeding slaves like cattle.  Delilah's mother was sold to a different owner than her daughter, and the child Delilah was sold to a Frenchman named Guillaume Henri.  Having no mother, she was raised by Henri's slave community at large.

The first incident she remembered in detail happened when she was eleven years old.  She was among a group of slaves Henri took into the city of Charleston where he was to pick up two runaway slaves.  He made them all watch as the two young male runaways were soundly beaten and had half their feet cut off so they couldn't run away again.  As the white trash overseer by the name of Clem was telling them what they had to remember, he made a menacing step toward Delilah, and she froze.  Before she could be beaten, her thirteen-year-old friend, Adah, had come to her rescue.  When they started back to the wagon to go home, Adah took Delilah to one side and gave her advice Delilah would follow all of her life.  She told her don't ever freeze, because when you do, that's when the bad things happen.  Sometimes she would be in a situation when she didn't know what was going on and didn't know what to do.  She would want to freeze, and she would want to die, but she couldn't die.  That was when she had to think.

Two years later, Delilah found herself in just such a situation.  She was a tiny girl, and very pretty.  One night, Clem dragged her from her bed in the middle of the night, gagged her, tied her wrists to a metal bar, and placed a black hood over her head.  She was put in a wagon and tied in.  Then, she was taken to a barn, and taken to a stage in the middle of the barn.  Her hands were raised over her head, and a rope tied to the bar.  She was pulled up so she could barely stand on her toes.  The black hood was removed, and she was stripped naked.  She was turned around to see that the walls were lined with rows of white men, wealthy men who had paid to see her humiliated.  They cheered as she was raped by a seven-foot slave.

Before the assault began, Delilah saw Adah moving above the men serving food and drink.  Her eyes were dull and lifeless and she didn't seem to care any more.  When her eyes met Delilah's, the spark of life returned, and it would be several years before they were parted again.  Adah helped deliver Delilah's children, a son, Bull, and a set of twins, a boy and a girl.  The boy died at birth when the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck.  The girl, Mary, survived.  She was about a year old when Delilah was taken into town to be sold.  She was bought by a Scotsman named Malcolm MacRae.  Clem stepped up to take Mary from her arms, but Delilah begged to keep her, and MacRae bought them both.  But Bull was ripped away from her, and had to remain with Adah.  She didn't know where they went.

The MacRaes moved to California before the Civil War began.  California was a free state, and Delilah found she could sue for freedom for herself and Mary.  It wasn't that the MacRaes were cruel to her.  In fact, Delilah reveled in the fact that she hadn't been beaten one time since MacRae had owned her, and Mary had never known what a beating was.  In fact, they had both become part of the MacRae family.  But, like every other human on Earth, Delilah wanted, no needed, to be free.

Delilah becomes a living, breathing human being for the reader, and her story will both open old wounds and help to heal them.  For the legacy she left all of us is the knowledge that there are more similarities between the races than differences, similarities that we can build a strong world on, if we can forget how to hate, an remember how to love and be free.

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