Akee Tree: A Descendant's Search for His Ancestors on the Eskridge Plantations

Author Stephen Hanks' painstaking 10-year research takes him back in time, not only through his own lineage, but also through the family of slaveholder Richard Eskridge, whose slaves create a paper trail on four plantations, ending up at the early 18th century plantation of Colonel George Eskridge, a Virginia attorney whom George Washington was named after. Akee Tree delivers to readers a fresh, raw, and revealing account of how four slave women--Akey, Jenny, Rose, Eliza--kept the author's family alive under 140 years under slavery until it was finally abolished and the Hanks family left Mississippi for Kansas after changing their last name. Akee Tree is not only an objective, dramatic, and interpretive family biography, but also a compelling investigative search for identity, as Stephen Hanks discovers his African ancestor's tribe. However, Akee Tree is also something more: a powerful cry for those who share the same surnames today yet who once shared the same plantations yesterday to reach out to each other.