Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia — the Salih Bilali passage

From a scholarly book published by the University of South Carolina Press, read on its Manifold platform, chapter 1 ('The Slave's Dream'): Salih Bilali was born in 1765, captured by slavers in 1790 as the Bambara consolidated control of the Upper Niger, confined at Anomabu on the Gold Coast, and arrived in North America in 1800, becoming head driver on John Couper's Cannon's Point plantation on St. Simons Island; given the name Tom, he 'remained a devout Muslim and continued to refer to himself as Salih'.