This poignant grassroots history, which draws on family memories, written narratives of slaves and former slaves, and facts gleaned from public records and historical journals, will enrich your understanding of how practices and traditions that grew out of the slave era such as "Jumping the Broom" -continue to reverberate in the African-American psyche today. Author Claude Green provides an "up close and personal history" that offers new insights into how such carryovers still exert power, in ways that may be subtly disempowering. Only by becoming aware of the past, says Green, can one break free of its hold.