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Thirty Years a Slave NewSouth Books Louis Hughes was born a slave in Virginia and at age twelve was sold away from his mother, whom he never saw again. After a few interim owners, he was sold to a wealthy slave owner and taken to Mississippi. Hughes was a house servant until near the end of the Civil War, when he escaped and then, in a daring adventure with the paid help of two Union soldiers, returned to the plantation for his wife. The couple made their way to Canada and after the war to Chicago and Detroit, eventually settling in Milwaukee. There Hughes became relatively comfortable as a hotel attendant and as an entrepreneur laundry operator. Self-educated and eloquent, Hughes wrote and privately published his memoir in 1897. It is a compelling account, by turns searing and compassionate about slavery, slaves, and slave owners. No reader can be unmoved as Hughes tells about his five attempts to escape, about having to stand by helplessly while watching his wife whipped, of the joy of finally meeting again the brother whom he had not seen since they were little children in Virginia. Yet he also writes knowingly about the economics of slavery and the day-to-day business of the plantation, and the glass-house relationships between slaves and masters. Hughes died in Milwaukee in 1913. This edition includes a new foreword by William L. Andrews, the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Andrews has written and edited several books on African-American culture and history and operates an extensive Web site on African slave narratives.
Reviews “Born to a white man and a ‘negress’ and brought up in a beautiful river valley near Charlottesville, Va., Hughes was bought and sold twice by the time he was 11 years old. In this absorbing account, first published in 1897, Hughes describes mundane yet evocative pieces of everyday life (such as drying sweet potatoes to use as a substitute for coffee during the Civil War) and astonishing events like his numerous attempts to escape bondage and his subsequent recapture. He writes with subtlety about his ‘masters' ’ hypocrisy, as when ‘Madam’ would smack him during meals: ‘Truly it was a monstrous domestic institution that not only tolerated, but fostered such an exhibition of table manners by a would-be fine lady—such vulgar spite and cruelty!’ Reflective moments like this make the re-publication of this memoir very welcome.” “. . .one of the most informative, insightful, and hopeful accounts of how Americans of color created their own freedom in the midst of a slave society.” “The re-publication of Louis Hughes’s Thirty Years a Slave is a remarkable achievement. Andrews’s foreword places this classic work in the proper context for all new readers. Riveting, powerful, this is a must-read for those who seek to understand contemporary America.” “From the moment I opened Louis Hughes’s Thirty Years a Slave, I could not put it down. Every page brought surprises and revelations, giving life to America’s haunted past.”
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