About Turtles on a Black Gum Tree: The Life of Charles Ball
**Logline:**
A harrowing journey of resilience and survival, chronicling Charles Ball’s life from slavery in Maryland to his escape from the deep South and return home.
**Book Blurb:**
Charles Ball was born into slavery in Calvert County, Maryland, and served under several owners until, at twenty-six, he was sold and taken to South Carolina as part of a fifty-person coffle. After nearly seven years of grueling and often intolerable treatment in South Carolina and Georgia, he fled Georgia and returned to Maryland. This creative rendering of Ball’s 1837 autobiography closely follows the original narrative and retains much of its wording. It recounts his upbringing in Maryland, his forced march to the deep South, and his escape and journey back home. Although he died in obscurity, Charles Ball left us with perhaps the most comprehensive and uncompromising portraits of slavery in the post-colonial era.
