Not That China: The Secret History of Slaves 

A new book about American slavery unearths the shocking experience of former slaves during Reconstruction in East Texas. Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves focuses on an unmarked cemetery in Harrison County, once the largest slave-owning county in Texas. This isn't a story about China. This is the story of the award-winning author of Longing for Darkness and The Bond Between Women, China Galland, who returns to her Texas hometown and confronts the racism of America's past and present.

China Galland visited her hometown in 1983 and found an old African-American burial ground in disarray. The unmarked headstones were cracked; weeds and debris had overrun the plot. Galland quickly began to research the cemetery, which Harrison County officials had closed off to the public for over 40 years. The writer, who is white, enlisted a multiracial group of locals and descendants of those buried in the cemetery to begin a clean-up effort, repairing headstones, pulling weeds and making offerings to the dead.

Through her restoration of the "Love Cemetery," Galland discovers more horrors of the black experience in post-Civil War Texas and weaves the stories into a first-person narrative as painful as it is uplifting. Many of those buried in the cemetery were found to be victims of torture, lynchings and unlawful land seizures. While she rejuvenates the graves of the enslaved and disenfranchised in her hometown, Galland exhumes a piece of American history that whites in the south too often try to forget, marginalize and ignore. At the same time, Galland confronts her own guilt as a product of a white family that lived in Harrison County during slavery.

While Galland uses the cemetery as a mechanism to tell a story about Southern racism, she cleverly draws comparisons between the physical burial ground and America's struggle with color. Galland writes in her book, "If racism lived anywhere it was inside of us, sometimes consciously, often unconsciously...Like the wisteria at the cemetery, perhaps we'd never be rid of it. Our only hope might be to keep attending to it, trimming it here, uprooting it there, cutting it back, cutting it back, contending with it."

Booklist calls Love Cemetery "a moving and inspiring account of race and history in a small town."

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