Fellow BitterSweet participant Sarah Eisner has just published a book, The Reparations Project, with her Reparations Project partner and co-founder, Randy Quarterman. The book is written in alternating chapters by Randy and Sarah, and covers the decades of their lives as they grew up in different parts of the world, and the ways in which their journeys, from the 1970’s to today, both diverged and dovetailed. It is an exploration into what factors and life experiences prepared them to meet one another in 2019 and do this work together. The book is a short but powerful memoir highly readable for any audience, that is being targeted toward teaching in college and high school courses, so if there are teachers among us that would like to use it, please let us know! Below is the publisher’s blurb. You can buy the book from Lived Places Publishing or Amazon.
How can a Black man and white woman, linked by ancestries in enslavement, use their uniquely different pasts to create space for a common reparative path toward the future?
Discover the intertwined histories and life stories 
of a descendant of enslavers and a descendant of the enslaved in rural Georgia.
In 2019,Sarah EisnercontactedRandy Quarterman, the great-great-great-grandson of a man her great-great-great-grandfather had enslaved. Building a friendship allowed them to rediscover their family histories and reckon with their own life paths, which diverged and dovetailed to ultimately lead them back to Savannah, Georgia.
Together, they worked to preserve a plot of land deeded from Keller to Quarterman in 1890, which was still held by the Quarterman family but in danger of being taken by eminent domain. The two created The Quarterman & Keller Foundation, The Reparations Project, and participated in the documentary, The Cost of Inheritance, with the goals of supporting Black education, Black land preservation, and Black art. A story of a challenging, close, and mutually healing friendship, this book is ideal reading for students of Black Studies, History, Civil Rights, Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, History, and Politics.
