Sapelo is a low-lying barrier island off the coast of Georgia, one of the few with its natural beauty unspoiled. Its sixty-seven people living there in Hog Hammock are descendants of slaves who once worked its huge cotton plantation.

William S. McFeely, a distinguished historian who has written three books that probe America's racial problems in the nineteenth century, visited Sapelo and met its people. With deft sketches, he tells us of Glasco Bailey and his turkeys, of Matty Carter and her garden, of Allen Green making baskets that are a work of art. And of the long past of their families.

McFeely had something more than a rich curiosity about the present to bring to Sapelo. He came with a profound knowledge of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction; using a remarkable group of family records, he traced the lives of the Baileys' and Carters' and Greens' forebears. There is Bilali, the practicing Muslim who left a manuscript he wrote in Arabic when he died, still a slave.

There are his daughters and his grandchildren who experienced the forced evacuation of slaves and the march into the interior of Georgia when the Union navy threatened the coast during the Civil War. There is the return to Sapelo, on foot, when the arrival of Sherman's invading army ended that slavery. March Carter and James Lemon, who ran away to join the Union army and fight for their own freedom, came back to go to school, to found a church, to vote in the promising days of Reconstruction.

Minto Bell, Bilali's daughter, was a free woman when she died in 1890 at age 110, and was buried in Behavior, the island's wonderfully named cemetery. With the skill of a novelist, McFeely gives a rich telling of the nineteenth-century past of Sapelo's people. Entering into the story himself, the author makes Sapelo's People a deeply felt meditation on race.