"The incredible true story of the last ship to carry enslaved people to America, the remarkable town its survivors founded after emancipation, and the complicated legacy their descendants carry with them to this day-by the journalist who discovered the ship's remains"--

"In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon. That community,...

A "beautifully written" coming-of-age story set on the Alabama Gulf Coast. Shortly after the end of WWII, 12-year-old Sean is sent to live with his grandparents on Hollingers Island by Mobile Bay. The island is a wild place where deer still roam the woods, fat water moccasins sun themselves on cypress knees and alligators, large and small, doze on creek banks. Sean’s closest friend is an aging black handyman, Robert Barnes, whose head is full of...