Most Americans are aware of the brutality of slavery, but few stop to consider that the abolition of slavery created a new turmoil for former slaves. To the complicated relationship she enjoys with the plantation owner’s son, Billy, is added another, with newly arrived “Chinamen” Bo/Beau and Master Liu. Sugar was born into slavery on a sugar plantation and still lives there, feeling constricted and anything but free. When Chinese laborers arrive, Sugar finally believes in a world beyond River Road Plantation. In 1870, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, many former slaves remain on their plantations-only now working for a bleak slave wage. Rhodes’ book elegantly chronicles the hope of one 10-year-old girl seeking a bigger world in post–Civil War America.
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