Reviews

Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days by Annie L. Burton

teriboop's review against another edition

3.0

This is a short little book written by Annie L. Burton, a young African American who grew up a slave. Most of her autobiography is written about her life after emancipation but it does briefly discuss the days of living as a young slave on a plantation in Alabama. The last 1/3 or more of the book is dedicated to poems and songs that inspired her.

glyptodonsneeze's review against another edition

3.0

Two books that also aren't worth mentioning at great length are The Story of My Childhood by Clara Barton and Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days by Annie L. Burton. I listened to these both on Librivox while I was doing Christmas iStore. Ms. Barton wrote her memoirs of childhood as an elderly woman after schoolchildren wrote to her persistently asking her about her younger days. Mrs. Burton wrote her memoirs while attending a night school in Boston. Ms. Barton's stories are all about growing up as the oops child of a prosperous New England farm family and being taught everything by four siblings who were already teenage schoolteachers. Mrs. Burton had worse origins, obviously. She still had time to roughhouse in the woods and poke at interesting things with sticks, but she didn't have any food. All the slaves left the plantation during the Civil War, including Mrs. Burton's mother, who went to set up a better life for her children, and Mrs. Burton and her siblings remained in the big house for a year until her mother came back for them. Ms. Barton attended the Civil War and says she would rather face the cannons at Antietam again than speak at public meeting. Mrs. Burton tells about the first night in her mother's cabin with a small hoe cake to divide between mother, a brother and a sister, and some other children, when a white woman and her children knocked cautiously at the door and asked if they could stay the night, because they are displaced by the war. Mother shares the hoe cake and young Annie is happy when they go so she won't have to share her food again. Meanwhile, Clara Barton's friend's horse runs away. Mrs. Burton grows up and moves north, works a series of jobs, and opens a couple restaurants. There's not a lot of childhood or slavery here and the books falls to a litany of employers. Ms. Barton's keeps the anecdotes coming. Being forbidden to ice skate, fever, crippling shyness. In the end, one of the leading lights of American phrenology stays at her parents' house while he's on the New England lecture circuit and he tells Mrs. Baron, "Clara will never stick up for herself, but she'll stick up for other people. Get her a school." So Ms. Barton is quickly trained up as a school teacher and rousingly successful at it. Founding the Red Cross isn't mentioned at all. Both books are worth the two hours it takes to listen to each of them.

http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/2015/01/merry-days-of-childhood-and-others.html