"Mississippi in Africa" turns 20

In 2004, I published what was in some ways a forerunner to What Happened, a nonfiction book, Mississippi in Africa, about a group of enslaved workers who were freed from a Mississippi plantation to emigrate to West Africa in the 1840s, long before Emancipation.

My original question, which no one could answer, was: What happened to them?

I had heard the s…