An Interview with Anne C. Bailey, Author of The Weeping Time

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I think there's so many things about it first of all it's the largest slave auction in American history of 400 plus slaves sold at one time it goes over a two-day period it takes place in Savannah Georgia and it's just a few years short shy of the Civil War so it's a particular time

like a snapshot of time if you will that really gives us a sense of where the country is going where it's been and where it's going the other thing that's remarkable about it though is that these people had rarely been sold it was much more typical in many other plantations that people who had would have been sold

maybe at least a few times in a lifetime and these people on the butler plantation had virtually almost never been sold so there were a really tight-knit community they had strong African traditions and they were really close the weeping time is what they call the auction event in March 2nd 3rd 1859 they

named it that because their families were now spit apart and you could be sold if you were married so that was considered a family unit but if you had you know your mother or your father or you know obviously your cousins or your brothers and sisters that was not considered a family unit so

again this close-knit community that had even though slavery was a very difficult and arduous time for them they still had family ties that they could depend on and now they couldn't depend on that at all so they call that time the weeping time I tried to tell the story of a human story is really what I want people to