Coming Through

"The speakers of the individual sections are story-tellers, and we receive their information as though we were listening to their stories. Coming Through comes much closer than the recordings of Gullah speech and song from this period I have heard to capturing what these people, so oppressed by poverty and ignorance, so isolated yet so proud of their traditions, must actually have sounded like. That this book exists at all is a marvel of meticulous and patient scholarship. I hope that many will indeed receive the wisdom, humor, beauty and inspiration of this book . . . . Coming Through speaks more eloquently to the true condition of black people in the Lowcountry between the War and the Second World War than any other book I have read. This is a book for 'dipping,' like a collection of short stories in which one may comfortably read an offering at a single sitting."—Charleston Mercury

"It's no stretch to compare Genevieve Chandler with William Faulkner, for both writers present us with entire worlds, complex flesh and blood worlds where the simple virtues of honesty, courage, and generosity not only endure but triumph. This oral history collection is a treasure."—William P. Baldwin, author of The Hard to Catch Mercy and Lowcountry Plantations Today

"The past, as Faulkner reminded us long ago, is never dead; it isn't even past. In this landmark work, Kincaid Mills, Genevieve C. Peterkin and Aaron McCullough have recovered the long-forgotten voices of former slaves and their descendants. First collected by Genevieve W. Chandler during the New Deal, these interviews shed light on a world that is at once distant and all too near. Coming Through reminds us anew of the great American tragedy of slavery and of its long, grim shadow of segregation. But it is a reminder, too, of the indomitability of the spirit of those who endured the seemingly unendurable, and lived to tell the tale. This is an important and seminal work."—Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek and author of American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation