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This reconstruction of one of the rare Caribbean slave narratives is an amplification, interrogation, and modification of its original texts by cross-reference with official documents, contemporary diaryentries and reports, present-day oral sources, and secondary analyses of plantation society. Accessing a variety of primary records, Maureen Warner-Lewis meticulously reconstructs a biography of enslaved Archibald Monteath, an Igbo, who was brought to Jamaica around 1802, became active in the Moravian Church and later purchased his freedom. Through Monteath's biography she explores the sociology of slavery from 1750 to the 1860s. Fieldwork conducted in Africa brings an important dimension to the work, and scholars of Caribbean history, church history, diasporic studies, Atlantic studies and Jamaica will find it of significant interest.

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Miss Lou had the instinctive wisdom to relate language to identity. As a people who have long since lost our identity, we continue to search for it.

There is an interrelationship between language  the words we use  and our identity. In that regard, Miss Lou helped us to remember who we are. However, mental slavery is still with us. While we continue to deny our own language, our way of expressing ourselves, there is no escaping the fact that our language is part of our identity as Jamaicans.

Although a lot of our unique cultural DNA disappeared during the Middle Passage, Miss Lou had the wisdom and the courage to grasp what remained of that DNA and give voice to the voiceless. She did it with such decisiveness that I have lived to see the day when Patwa, or Jamaican Language as it is properly called, has taken its rightful place as an important part of our identity.

That is Miss Lous legacy. - Beverly Manley-Duncan