Sonny, Cold Slave Cradle

A bold, mesmerizing novel that interweaves the story of two slaves with the characters in Bonnie Stanard’s previous novels, Master of Westfall Plantation and Kedzie, Saint Helena Island Slave. Slavery was a system that separated black families. Even benevolent plantation owners in the old South were responsible for taking babies from their mothers. The story of Sonny is not documented history, but accounts preserved in diaries, memoirs, and slave narratives give a truth to this fiction. The slave Sonny is given away as a gift to a visiting couple while he is still a baby in a cradle. He leaves Westfall in the care of strangers who soon thereafter sell him to a slave trader. Two slaves who dearly love him, a deaf mute and the stableman, endure the heartbreak that epitomizes this sad truth about slavery. How they endure and prevail is the story of Sonny, Cold Slave Cradle.