Jacqueline Dowdell. (Summer reading).

In my second year of graduate school, I traveled south for the first time in my life, joinging four other students on a spring break vacation to Kiawah Island, South Carolina. The vacation turned into a history lesson of sorts for me. Every morning my friends and I drove into Charleston, where we toured the city block by block, taking in its landscape and history.

The low point of that South Carolina vacation was a tour of Boone Plantation, a shameful tourist trap of a place owned by a local family outside of Charleston. Much of the house is still in use and cordoned off, but tourists are led by a docent in period dress to three rooms on the ground floor and are free to roam the grounds. For about ten minutes the guide points out the architecture of the place, admires the parlor doors, alludes to the slaves (called servants) who once worked the land, leads visitors through a narrow doorway to the gentleman's quarters, then drops them in the yard. On that afternoon, our docent was unprepared to answer the most straightforward of inquiries into the property's history as it related to the African-American experience.

I was reminded of that afternoon when I read Demark Vesey: The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It by David Robertson (Knopf, $23, 165 pp.). This short book is as engrossing as a mystery novel but so much more. Vesey was a well-traveled, literate, and multilingual slave who bought his freedom with winnings from the Charleston lottery. Ostensibly he lived a quiet life as a free black carpenter. In 1822, though, Vesey enlisted some nine thousand slaves in a plan to burn Charleston to the ground and murder its white inhabitants in a quest for freedom for the city's slaves. One of the most ambitious attempts at liberation ever conceived, Vesey's plot has been all but obliterated from the history books. In Denmark Vesey, Robertson unearths from correspondence, court records, and other documents as much information as possible about Vesey and his thirty-four co-conspirators, who were hanged in the summer of 1822. Robertson covers centuries of Charleston history in his effort to document the attempted rebellion and its participants. He contends in his closing pages that we have an "obligation to honor at least what little remains of an attempted great liberator." He has done so with this book.

Edward Ball and Edwina Harleston Whitlock excavate a little more of Charleston's history in The Sweet Hell Inside: The Rise and Fall of an Elite Black Family in the Segregated South (Perennial, $13.95, 352 pp.). This book, like Ball's Slaves in the Family (Ballantine, $16.95, 445 pp.), is a genealogical treasure hunt of sorts. It acknowledges slavery's labyrinthine relationships, yielding a rich, honest, and compelling story that contends with our nation's complicated racial history. Slaves in the Family follows the Balls' slave-owning legacy over several centuries, interweaving the stories of present-day African-American families descended from Ball slaves. But at its core the book is about Ball's discovery of and reflection on his family's past and his relationship as a white man to that past. The Sweet Hell Inside developed from Ball's communications with his African-American cousin, Edwina Harleston Whitlock, whom he met while researching his earlier book. Ball takes up Whitlock's family history, which filled an entire back room of her home, with the same care, sensitivity, and patience he gave his own in Slaves in the Family. The black Harleston line is descended from William Harleston, a white son of Charleston's plantation-owning elite, who never married but carried on a thirty-five-year sexual relationship with Kate Wilson, his black slave. He fathered eight children with Wilson. These children, left destitute after Harleston's death, had to find their way in the years after the Civil War, unwelcome in both black and white Charleston society. In time, the family managed personal triumphs in the face of the Jim Crow laws of the segregated South.

The Sweet Hell Inside documents a family legacy that included a funeral empire founded at the turn of the century by Edwin G. "Captain" Harleston, William Harleston's son, and a successful orphanage, with its world-renowned Jenkins Orphanage Band, managed by Ella Harleston and the Reverend Daniel Jenkins. By 1918, Harleston and Jenkins would have the resources to buy a four-story Federal-style mansion in Charleston, not far from the Work House where Denmark Vesey awaited execution nearly a century before.

Incidentally, the artist Teddy Harleston, grandson of the slave Kate Wilson, received an invitation in 1923 to exhibit his artwork at the Negro Division of the New York Public Library at 135th Street in Harlem, a burgeoning place for black New York society in the 1920s. Harleston exhibited several works there, including Portrait of the Reverend Caesar S. Ledbetter, which is published in The Sweet Hell Inside. In 1940, the Negro Division was renamed the Schomburg Center.

The Sweet Hell Inside is the story of these familial accomplishments in the face of repression, hostility, and disconnection but, like the other histories mentioned here, it is also testament to repressed, overlooked, or unacknowledged histories that survive in oral tradition, historical societies, burial grounds, and our own consciousness. We just have to be willing to do the digging.

Jacqueline Dowdell is editor for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library.