Saleh's Children: Three Generations of Plantation Masters and Their Slave Women - Paperback

by Howard Bott (Author)

In 1795, Saleh was born in the western African Fulani tribal homeland. Her uncle Tenkaminen, a sorcerer and healer, chose his intelligent, beautiful niece as the recipient of his knowledge of herbs, spells and visions. But her impoverished father sold her into slavery. At a Charleston, South Carolina, auction house, Saleh was bought by George Leyland-a young, wealthy tobacco planter-who was captivated by her at first sight. Immediately, he changed her name to Sally and drew her into a life of ever-increasing humiliation and sexual brutality. Sally, her daughter Young Sally and her granddaughter Missy all suffered the same forced attentions from three generations of Leyland men. As the Civil War approached, these three black women were suddenly confronted with the possibility of using the confusion and dislocation of the tumultuous times to make a strike, each in her own way, for escape to the North ... and to freedom.

Author Biography

A native of northern Ohio, HOWARD BOTT graduated from a military academy in Tennessee, where he encountered racial segregation, an experience that stayed with him all his life. After high school, Howard enlisted in the army, where he learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute in California and taught radio voice intercept at the Army Security Agency School near Boston. Pleasant memories of California drew him back to settle there after leaving the army. He had careers as a police officer and a licensed marriage and family therapist, with both careers satisfying in different ways his fascination with human relationships. His interests increasingly focused on American history, particularly the Civil War, and slavery in the American South. He is the author of three novels and numerous short stories. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Nancy.