Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community

Charles Joyner takes readers on a journey back in time, up the Waccamaw River through the Lowcountry of South Carolina, past abandoned rice fields once made productive by the labor of enslaved Africans, past rice mills and forest clearings into the antebellum world of All Saints Parish. In this community, and many others like it, enslaved people created a new language, a new religion—indeed, a new culture—from African traditions and American circumstances.

Joyner recovers an entire lost so...