First Sentence

"This book is about ordinary black men, women and children mostly before the general emancipation but after that time, too - a study of enslaved Afro-Americans, their children, and their grandchildren, how they adapted to enslavement by developing distinctive domestic arrangements and kin networks that nurtured a new Afro-American culture, and how these, in turn, formed the social basis of developing Afro-American communities, which prepared slaves to deal with legal freedom."