Excellent social history . . . Leslie's outstanding detective work illuminates issues of race and class in the life of a woman who escaped the limits of both.

—Publishers Weekly

Leslie pieces together a story that provides a surprisingly detailed account of life in the nineteenth-century South.

—Booklist

Leslie overcomes the limitations of her sources to provide new insights on the intersection of race, class, and gender in the postbellum South, through the life of this remarkable woman.

—Choice

While painstakingly reconstructing the identity and experiences of a woman who was born a slave but raised as free, Leslie discovered and then described a South where day-to-day social relations often defied social prescription. . . . A lovingly written account of the life of a heretofore unknown southern woman. Yet it is much more than that. This slim volume is also eloquent testimony to a woman whose very identity and experiences called race-based slavery into question. It is there, where the unusual is portrayed as usual, that the book excels. For it is there that Leslie demonstrates that more open, or fluid, race relations could exist in the nineteenth-century South.

—Journal of American History