It began with a simple remark by a southern mansion owner: “Honey, look here. My daddy never let anybody plow this end of the field. The slaves are buried there.”

China Galland’s curiosity led her to discover an abandoned, overgrown patch of land in east Texas known as Love Cemetery, and then to help organize a campaign to restore it and re-establish access for the modern descendents of these slaves and their community.

Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves chronicles this project while shedding light on the lives of America’s African transplants and their longtime enslavement.

Most casual readers of the South’s history know that the Civil War helped to free the slaves and give them full constitutional rights, many of which they lost by the end of the 19th century and did not regain until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Galland fills in many gaps such as the details of how “negroes” with property were tricked or coerced by whites into selling it. She follows the trail through dusty archives in land title offices, showing how the parcels of land once owned by some of the four million newly emancipated slaves in 1865 eventually found their way into the hands of big corporations or plantation owners.

One clergyman, an authority on the local history, told her of the “store system” in place before and after the turn of the 20th century. “The storekeeper would give you a mule, a wagon. And then, (when it was) time to pay, you owe me so many thousands of dollars. Oh, you don’t have the money? Well, I’ll just have to take your land.” In other cases, deeds were taken as payment for medical services.

Galland is shocked to learn that her own ancestors benefitted from this system. Meanwhile, there’s Love Cemetery, so named because a landowner named Della Love deeded the 0.24-hectare parcel in Harrison County to the Love Colored Burial Association. Now, this fenced-off property overgrown with wisteria and dry weeds becomes the author’s personal cause.

She gets in touch with a multiracial collection of local leaders and their communities, and they work together cleaning the place up and mapping the headstones and simple markers they uncover. These portions that she recorded diary-style celebrate the rewards of volunteer co-operation in an attempt to atone for past wrongs.

Galland, an accomplished writer, professor and lecturer on race, religion and reconciliation, engagingly relates her personal journey as well. Her apparent bossiness drew an angry reaction from one of the descendants of the slaves, revealing how old wounds are far from healed.