The dramatic and colorful autobiography of a Black woman born in 1909 in rural Alabama. A rare first-person account of life in the twentieth-century South, He Included Me weaves together the story of a black family-eight children reared in rural Alabama, their mother a schoolteacher, their father a minister-and the emerging self-portrait of a woman determined, like her parents, to look ahead. Sarah Rice recalls her mother's hymn of thanks-"He Include...

"Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors-the last documented survivors of any slave ship-whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways"--

In a rural settlement 20 miles or so from Tuskegee in east-central Alabama [they] found him - the man Theodore Rosengarten calls Nate Shaw - a black man, 84 years old, in full possession of every moment of his life and every facet of its meaning...Theodore Rosengarten...had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who...