Feb 8th at 5:30pm – book will be on sale onsite with Mystery Loves Company.
Bear Me Into Freedom: The Talbot County of Frederick Douglass, by Jeffrey C. McGuiness. Douglass wrote
three autobiographies detailing his birth and eleven years as a youth enslaved in Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern
Shore. For the first time, Bear Me Into Freedom tells that story using Douglass’s words accompanied by images created
in the same places and during the same seasons Douglass describes in his autobiographies.
Prof. Celeste-Marie Bernier, one of the world’s foremost Douglass family scholars said about Bear Me Into Freedom, “An
inspirational photographer, McGuiness’ powerful pictures recreate, reimagine, and remember the rivers, the woods, the
fields, the buildings, and the towns where Frederick Douglass lived, imagined, philosophized, protested, resisted, and
warred by any and every means necessary against the ‘hottest hell of unending slavery.’”
Frederick Douglass is an iconic figure in American history—a powerful writer, stirring orator, and revolutionary
philosopher. He was a crusader in the fight to abolish enslavement, establish emancipation, and promote justice and
civil rights. His story is inextricably linked with Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the place where he was born
into slavery in 1818 and spent eleven of the first twenty years of his life before seeking his freedom in New England.
Douglass detailed his Talbot experiences with astonishing precision in his three autobiographies, experiences that
became the foundation of the most powerful slave narrative in American literature.
As said by Jeffrey McGuiness, “Talbot County, half water and half land in the Chesapeake Bay estuary, is like no other
county in America. Riddled with streams, creeks, rivers, and bays, its unique geography was the source of Douglass’s
fervent belief that Talbot’s waters would one day bear him into freedom. While rapidly changing, enough remains in
Talbot to hint as what the county may have looked like when Douglass was here which Bear Me Into Freedom seeks to
portray.”
A photobook of 284 pages, Bear Me Into Freedom was printed by Brilliant Graphics in Exton, PA, which does work for
several major art museums, including the National Gallery of Art. The book is available through the St. Michaels
Museum, Amazon, and its website: https://www.bearmeintofreedom.com/ .
About the Author
Jeffrey C. McGuiness is a photographer and writer with Bay Photographic Works living in St.
Michaels, Maryland. Most of the places Frederick Douglass lived in Talbot County are either a five-
minute walk at most a 35-minute drive from his home. His upcoming photobook is Shiloh Valley:
Four Years in God’s Corner, a photographic essay of a German farming community in St. Clair
County, IL.