“MR. EDITOR – I desire some information about my mother. The last time I saw her was in Alexandria, Virginia, about the year 1852 or 1853. Her name was Hannah. She belonged to Lawyer Tibbs who sold her when I was quite young to a trader named Bruthing.”
So begins a letter to the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper in New Orleans, Louisiana, written by 55-year-old Henry Tibbs and published on Dec. 11 in 1879. It is one of thousands of such heart-rending pleas that appeared in papers across the country, starting even before slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War and continuing as late as the 1920s.
The victims of America’s bustling domestic slave trade—what has been labeled by historians as the “Second Middle Passage”—are the subject of a riveting new book by Villanova University history professor Judith Giesberg that will publish Feb. 4, just in time for the observance of Black History Month. “Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families” (Simon & Schuster, $29.99, 309 pages) is an exhaustively researched and heavily annotated account of that struggle. Following a fact-filled introduction, Giesberg’s book builds itself around 10 of those letters to editors, devoting a chapter to each writer’s individual story and giving it historical context.
A cautionary note: Don’t expect 10 happy endings recounted herein. Giesberg, who, with graduate students, built an online “Last Seen Archive” that contained 4,568 of the advertisements as of May 2024, estimates that the rate of those that resulted in family reunions may have been as low as 2%. But the ads fulfilled multiple other purposes, not the least of which was to serve as a vital counternarrative to the growing “Lost Cause” myth in the Deep South that slavery had been a benign institution in which the masters cared for and provided support for fortunate workers on their plantations. The 10 true stories that Giesberg expertly weaves together in “Last Seen” put the damning lie to that notion and serve as testament to the endurance and sheer resilience of the “Freed Generation” that kept searching for their lost loved ones long after the emancipation.
The other shoe drops: Some of us turned to the late author Hilary Mantel’s magnificent “Wolf Hall” trilogy only after watching the award-winning 2015 British TV series based on events in the first two books and then were delighted to hear actor Mark Rylance’s voice ringing in our heads as we read the dialogue from the Thomas Cromwell character he played. Every fan of the book and series has cause to rejoice at the news that March 23 will bring the premiere of Season 2 to “Masterpiece” on PBS, showing here in the Bay Area at 9 p.m. on KQED. The six-episode series, based on the final book “The Mirror and the Light,” will reprise Rylance’s role as the right-hand man to King Henry VIII, once again played by a haughty Damian Lewis. It picks up after the death of Anne Boleyn, as Cromwell seeks to solidify his status as the second most powerful man in Britain. Find a brief teaser here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/clips/wolf-hall-the-mirror-and-the-light-trailer/.
In the pipeline: Coming from the Crown publishing house on March 11 is an amazingly rich and detailed work of nonfiction of keen interest to anyone interested in the history of the development of San Francisco. Author Gary Krist’s “Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco” (Crown, $32, 360 pages), while organized around a criminal case in the early 1870s that was the equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial of its day, is much more than a crime story. Wrapped around the details of an adulterous love affair that scandalized the citizenry when Laura D. Fair shot A.P. Crittenden, her prominent lawyer paramour, on a ferry boat in broad daylight and in full view of his wife and children is a parallel and fascinating history of San Francisco’s transformation from a rowdy town on the Western frontier fueled by Gold Rush dreams and greed to a bustling metropolis imbued with Victorian sensibilities and class-consciousness and striving hard for respectability.
Multiple recognizable figures fill these pages, including Bret Harte, Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain and Mary Ellen Pleasant, the light-skinned, wealthy black woman now considered the mother of the civil rights movement in San Francisco (the city’s smallest park has a plaque dedicated to her). Readers will also be delighted to encounter surprising historical nuggets throughout. Here is one of my favorites: The longest and most expensive telegram ever sent up to that time went in 1864 from Republican supporters of Abraham Lincoln lobbying to get the state of Nevada admitted to the Union to garner its citizens votes for his re-election. In desperation, they telegraphed the entire proposed state constitution to Washington, D.C. Nevada was admitted as the 36th state just eight days before the November election, but it turned out that its puny three electoral votes were not needed. Lincoln handily beat former general George B. McClellan without them. Another delicious tidbit, encountered in the Epilogue, is that San Francisco was the first city to bring electric lights to its central downtown area, a feat accomplished in 1879, three years before Thomas Edison did it for New York.
“Trespassers,” by the way, is Krist’s fourth narrative about rapid transformations in major American cities; he is also the author of “City of Scoundrels” (about Chicago), “Empire of Sin” (New Orleans) and “The Mirage Factory” (Los Angeles.) He has upcoming Bay Area appearances scheduled to discuss his latest: He’ll be at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 4 p.m. March 16, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco at 5:30 p.m. March 17 and at Sausalito Books by the Bay at 5:30 p.m. March 18.
Believe it or not: With apologies to Ripley’s, we’d like to offer occasional pieces of trivia about literature that stagger the imagination when first encountered. A.A. Milne’s beloved “Winnie the Pooh,” first published as a story collection in 1926, became a runaway best-seller again in 1960 in a Latin version translated by a Dr. Alexander Lenard. “Winnie Ille Pu,” as it was titled in that maybe not-so-dead language, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 20 weeks and wound up selling 125,000 copies. No word if the bear of very little brain was wearing a toga or not, but we thank mentalfloss.com for calling the fact to our attention.
Hooked on Books is a monthly column by Sue Gilmore on current literary buzz and can’t-miss upcoming book events. Look for it here every last Thursday of the month.
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