Reseña del libro "Both Feet Cut Off, Yet We Stand (en Inglés)"
In the 1870 federal census for Guntersville, Alabama, an enumerator came to the household of a fifty-year-old man named George Williams, born in South Carolina, freed five years earlier. In the column reserved for occupation, the column that asked for a man's occupation, the enumerator wrote four words: both feet cut off. That entry is where this book begins, and where its title comes from. Both Feet Cut Off, Yet We Stand traces six generations of one Black American family out of slavery in Alabama and Georgia and into a house on Wellington Street in Detroit. It follows three enslaved family systems that had no reason ever to meet. In Madison County, Alabama, Calvin Powers and Mary Jane Rice walked out of bondage in 1865 with a four-year-old daughter and nothing else, and within fifteen years owned a house on Franklin Street. Fifty miles southeast in Marshall County, George Williams, who could not walk and who according to family memory crawled to his own table, raised the children who carried his story, and his daughter Paralee married a man who signed his marriage bond with an X. In what was Cobb County and became Milton County, Georgia, a freedman named Jackson Cotton held eighty acres in his own name at a time when fewer than three percent of Black Georgians owned land of any kind. Those three lines converge in Detroit in 1923, in the marriage of Charles Washington Gober and Willia Mae Powers, and in the four children they raised. Dr. Courtney Carson Gober spent more than twenty years assembling this record. The book rests on federal census pages, Freedmen's Bureau registers, marriage bonds and licenses, probate inventories that name enslaved people and set a price on each one, Southern Claims Commission testimony, draft cards, death certificates, Georgia tax digests, the Black press of Detroit, a 1938 Tennessee Valley Authority condemnation case, and a DNA test traced to the paternal line. Sixty-two documents are reproduced in full, alongside twenty-eight family photographs and a six-generation family tree. Where the evidence is strong, the book says so. Where it runs out, the book says that too, and names the question it could not answer. At the center of it is a woman named Annie Lee Erskine, called Motherdear, born in Guntersville in 1884 to two people who had been born into slavery. She lived ninety-six years. In a Detroit kitchen in 1980, at the end of that life, she held her great-grandson, the author, who was two years old. The hands that held him had been held by parents who were somebody's property. This book is what he found when he went looking. A closing chapter shows how the records were located, and how much of this history is sitting in public archives right now, waiting on anyone willing to look.
