Iola grows up believing herself the white daughter of a wealthy Mississippi planter, until his death exposes her mother’s African descent and she is sold into slavery. Freed by advancing Union troops, she nurses the wounded, declines a white doctor’s proposal rather than deny her people, and sets out after the war to find her mother and brother amid Reconstruction’s hopes and dangers.
Published in 1892 by the abolitionist poet and lecturer, one of the most widely read novels by an African American woman of its century. Download the free EPUB.