A Natural Death by Nancy Price


A Natural Death
Title : A Natural Death
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0316718521
ISBN-10 : 9780316718523
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 376
Publication : First published January 1, 1973

"A Natural Death" - Three young people enter the slave society of South Carolina, eleven years before the Civil War. The new slave mistress, "Buck" Algrew has never owned a slave. The young black couple, Joan and Will King have been raised in freedom, but are captured and sold to separate rice plantations and a life of slavery they could never have imagined. ...................... ......Joan, Will and Buck must survive in a Wonderland as unbelievable as the one that the Cheshire Cat described to "But I don't want to go among mad people, " Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat. "We're all mad here".

A Natural Death Reviews

  • Donna

    Pre Civil War account of slavery in the South. This story begins with Amzi King, a white man, finding 2 "nigger" babies in his cornfield. The boy, Will, had an ear cut off and the baby girl, Joan, had her face cut up badly. These 2 children come to be raised by Amzi as free blacks. They were then married to each other by Amzi when they became of the age where they were coming to find each other as man and woman.
    After Amzi passes away, Joan and Will are taken prisoners and sold as slaves to the Algrew's at Abbotsford Plantation in North Carolina. Here Joan and Will must learn a whole different style of living. Joan and Will had been raised by a white person and knew how to do many things that the white people did. It was hard for them to go from being clean and neat to a lifestyle where the black people didn't have the facilities to keep clean and have places of their own.
    Interesting reading as to the living conditions of the slaves in the South and how they come to achieve places of accomplishment.

  • Jennifer

    A story of slavery in S.C. in 1850. Slave dialect was hard to understand but accurate (I think) the author used a source from 1867. Slavery was awful in that it didn't teach the slaves to work hard to gain things.