My Southern Home: Or, the South and Its People

After emancipation, what does "home" mean to a man who was once property? William Wells Brown, born into slavery in Kentucky and escaped to freedom in 1834, returns to the South in the years after the Civil War to answer this question. But this is no simple homecoming. Brown travels through the former Confederacy as a free man and a celebrated author, observing a region grappling with emancipation, reconstruction, and the persistence of white supremacy. What he finds is a landscape of contradictions: former enslavers now dependent on Black labor, formerly enslaved people building new lives under impossible conditions, and a "home" that never truly welcomed him. Originally published in 1880, "My Southern Home" blends memoir, travel writing, and social commentary. Brown draws on decades of observations and his earlier abolitionist writings to create something uniquely his own: a meditation on freedom that acknowledges its incompleteness, and a search for belonging in a nation that has not yet made good on its promises.