Who:  Regina Mason, co-editor, Life of William Grimes the Runaway Slave.  William Grimes was her great-great-great grandfather.

What/When/Where

#1  Lecture
William Grimes: Savannah’s Literate Urban Slave
Monday, November 4, 2019 at 6:30 p.m.
Second African Baptist Church, 123 Houston Street, Savannah, GA
Reception to follow.
Special thank you to host institution – Second African Baptist Church

#2   Film/Savannah Premiere
Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes
Wednesday, November 6 at 6 p.m.
Savannah State University (building TBD)
Host of the Africana Studies Program.
Special thank you to host institution –Africana Studies Program, Savannah State University

Additionally:  Mason, along with William L. Andrews of UNC-Chapel Hill, edited her ancestor William Grimes’s slave narrative.    Of Grimes, Davenport House Museum Director, Jamie Credle, says, “What makes this authentic to us, here in Savannah, is that twelve pages of Grimes’s story are about his time in Savannah in the early 19^th century.  He may have resided at one time on Columbia Square and he knew the people the Davenports knew and walked the streets the Davenports traversed.  Our partners believe strongly that we need to make Grimes’s name and story familiar to the broader community.  This story has authenticity to the slavery story in Savannah.”

Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave is the first fugitive slave narrative in American history. Because Grimes wrote and published his narrative on his own, without deference to white editors, publishers, or sponsors, his Life has an immediacy, candor, and no-holds-barred realism unparalleled in the famous antebellum slave narratives of the period. This edition of Grimes’s autobiography represents a historic partnership between noted scholar of the African American slave narrative, William L. Andrews, and Regina Mason, Grimes’s great-great-great-granddaughter. Their extensive historical and genealogical research has produced an authoritative, copiously annotated text that features pages from an original Grimes family Bible, transcriptions of the 1824 correspondence that set the terms for the author’s self-purchase in Connecticut (nine years after his escape from Savannah, Georgia), and many other striking images that invoke the life and times of William Grimes.[Book Description on Amazon.]