The increased emphasis on microhistory in the study of the African diaspora continues to bring attention to remarkable individuals whose life stories were previously unknown or dismissed as apocrypha. In this carefully argued and well-researched book, Randy Sparks examines the biographies of African-born actors who came to the southern United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as free persons or as victims of the slave trade. He traces their complicated travel routes from Africa to North America, where some of them remained, while others returned to Africa or went elsewhere. These Africans also made intermediary stops in England, the Caribbean, or New England. Sparks not only describes where they went and when, but he locates their movements on maps.

Perhaps the most exceptional of these compelling ‘life geographies’ is that of Elizabeth and Catherine Cleveland, two mixed-race women whose family operated a successful slave trade business in the Sherbro River region of Sierra Leone. Educated in Liverpool, Elizabeth was the daughter of William Cleveland, an Englishman, and Kate, an Anglo-African. Catherine, Elizabeth's niece, was the daughter of John Cleveland, Elizabeth's brother, and an African mother. In 1764, after the death of William Cleveland, Elizabeth and Catherine headed to Charleston, South Carolina, aboard a slave ship carrying over 300 enslaved victims in the lower deck. In South Carolina, William Cleveland's wealthy relatives welcomed their mixed-race African relatives, and these family connections contributed to Elizabeth's privileged social position in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Elizabeth was socially accepted as white, although the state of South Carolina legally declared her mulatto when her race became an issue in the settlement of her estate. She purchased plantation properties, integrated into the planter community, and married a British Army surgeon. Catherine, however, was always considered a person of color, both legally and socially, and she associated with the free black community. Elizabeth protected Catherine's freedom and bequeathed her the Raccoon Hill plantation. After a lengthy court battle, Catherine finally obtained her inheritance from Elizabeth, which made her a plantation owner and an affluent member of South Carolina's free black community.

Like the Clevelands, the Holmans, an Anglo-African family engaged in the slave trade in the Rio Pongo area of modern Guinea (Conakry), came to the South Carolina Lowcountry to establish residence and invest in plantations. John Holman, the English progenitor of family, brought his African wife Elizabeth and their five Anglo-African children along with fifty enslaved Africans in 1789. When Holman died in 1792, his will dictated that his ‘slave Elizabeth’ and his children be manumitted, an action that indicates that his family had been legally enslaved in South Carolina until his death. It also speaks to the need he felt to protect his wife and children from enslavement and from losing the property he left to them. The Holman children affiliated with other mixed-race families in the free black community. John Holman's daughters married into prosperous free black families, and stayed in South Carolina. However, his sons eventually returned to Africa to re-establish themselves as slave traders.

For other life geographies, such as those of Robert Johnson, Dimmock Charlton, and Charles Smith, the documentary record is more fragmentary and partially derived from testimonies that these individuals provided of their own lives. Because the veracity of these narratives was questioned by some of their contemporaries, as well as by historians, Sparks expends considerable effort verifying these accounts, often by raising questions of specific events and posing alternative possibilities for their interpretation. As he notes, the difficulties associated with confirming these narratives is partially the result of the ways in which archives are created and information is preserved. The well-documented life geographies of the Clevelands and Holmans is due to their class position, wealth, and power which made it possible ‘for them to leave their mark in the historical record on both sides of the Atlantic’ (161).

Singularly or taken together, these life geographies elucidate the malleability of identity, race, and class, while they also show how these actors negotiated varied sociopolitical terrains across the Atlantic World. These stories also capture the agency and resilience of individuals in ways that is often difficult to grasp in studies of slave communities. Although these biographies are atypical of the experience of the vast majority of Africans who came to the Americas, they nonetheless provide examples of the diverse experiences of Africans in the diaspora, as well as significant insights into the larger communities of which these actors were a part. This excellent publication should be on the must-read list for all students of the African diaspora.