"Combing real historical artifacts with fictional stories, Carole Lexa Schaefer brings each fascinating object to life by imagining the hands that might have made it and those that might have used it." --Dust jacket.

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama, and continued to farm the land until the late 1920s when he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, devising his visual language to depict his memories of slavery and scenes of a radically changing urban culture, becoming one of America's...