[Signed] [First Edition] Historic Sketches of the South ROCHE

First edition. Octavo. 148pp. Frontispiece and 10 plates. Blue cloth binding titled in gilt. Partially unopened with just a hint of foxing, and a few small nicks at the bottom edge of the front board and the foot of the spine, very good. Inscribed by the author: "To Mrs. Emerson Compliments of Emma Langdon Roche." Roche, born into a prominent Mobile, Alabama family, wrote this book, the first to be based on interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, also known as Kazoola, a survivor of the Middle Passage as a captive on the last known slave ship, *Clotilda*, which a group of Americans used to illegally import slaves into Alabama in 1860 from present day Benin, more than a half century after the suspension of the Atlantic slave trade. This book includes a photograph of Lewis and his wife, Abache, as well as drawings of Cudjo, Abache, and other survivors. This book was used by later researchers and writers as a resource about the residents of Africatown on the outskirts of Mobile and the history of the *Clotilde*. Zora Neale Hurston, then a student of anthropology, interviewed Cudjo Lewis and other Africans in Alabama as part of her research. She published an article in 1927, "Cudjo's Own Story of the Last African Slaver," purportedly based on her interviews with Lewis, but later thought to be mostly derivative of Roche's text in *Historic Sketches of the South.* Exceptionally scarce source material, and rarely found signed.

Estimate:$2,500

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