Sonny, Cold Slave Cradle

Set on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, on the threshold of the Civil War, this story recounts a grim time for blacks losing hope of ever gaining freedom. How two slaves hold on to their dreams in a world committed to destroying them will haunt you long after you've finished the book.

A bold, mesmerizing novel that interweaves the story of two slaves with the characters in Bonnie Stanard’s previous novels, Master of Westfall Plantation and Kedzie, Saint Helena Island Slave. Slavery was a system that separated black families. Even benevolent plantation owners in the old South were responsible for taking babies from their mothers. The story of Sonny is not documented history, but accounts preserved in diaries, memoirs, and slave narratives give a truth to this fiction. The slave Sonny is given away as a gift to a visiting couple while he is still a baby in a cradle. He leaves Westfall in the care of strangers who soon thereafter sell him to a slave trader. Two slaves who dearly love him, a deaf mute and the stableman, endure the heartbreak that epitomizes this sad truth about slavery. How they endure and prevail is the story of Sonny, Cold Slave Cradle.

Born and raised in rural South Carolina, Stanard’s interest in the conditions and fate of South Carolina slaves grew out of her family’s experience in working the land in the early 1900’s when descendants of slaves were struggling to make their way as free men and women. Thoroughly researched, Sonny, like Kedzie and Master, while fiction, is historically based and tells the story of plantation life that affected thousands of young slaves girls in the years leading up to the war. In addition to historical fiction, Stanard writes poetry and short stories which have been published in journals such as Harpur Palate, The Griffin, Slipstream, Eclipse, The Connecticut Review, and The South Carolina Review. She has edited periodicals in Brussels, Belgium (Rendez-vous), Richmond (Fanfare), and rural South Carolina (FairView News).