"I can't quite tell my age . . . but I guess I must be about fifty eight or fifty nine years old."  So begins the story of the life of Henrietta Wood, a story which she told in 1876 to a reporter named Lafcadio Hearn.  Born into slavery, Henrietta would be sold for the first time at the age of sixteen to a man named Henry Forsyth.  It was her third owner, however, a Frenchman named William Cirode and his family who would set Henrietta on a path towards a "sweet taste of liberty," a brief period of freedom, then cruelly conspire to have that liberty stolen away.  The man they hired to do so was Zebulon Ward, a name that Henrietta would remember when she was kidnapped and sold downriver to the nightmarish world of the cotton fields.  Henrietta's resilience, however, would keep her alive and her determination to see Zebulon Ward pay his due would ultimately remind us that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."


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Main Source:

McDaniel, W. Caleb.  Sweet Taste of Liberty:  A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America.  Oxford University Press, 2019.