"Mary Williams Magahee, an unmarried, early middle-aged African American woman, is fully engaged in the rich social and economic life of her thriving free black community in Colonial Rhode Island in the 1770s. She is also the keeper of an absorbing journal, My Story Being This: Details of the Life of Mary Williams Magahee, Lady of Colour. Mary's many public roles include tutor, gardener, trader, housekeeper, practiced and participating naturopath, her ailing father's caretaker, and popular confidante. Privately, befitting for a woman of her color, standing, and era, she presents herself through her thoughts and writings as an astute, profound social and political commentator on issues relating to slavery and abolition, race relations and - as news of colonial unrest trickles out of Boston - the approaching American Revolution. Along with her own alternately gripping and workaday life story, Mary records for posterity her personal road to freedom, the tragic slave narrative that is her father's wrenching biography, and the diverse, often harrowing, personal histories of a number of her African American neighbors and acquaintances. My Story Being This is ultimately a celebration of family relationships, hopes, dreams, desires, everyday life, and culture among free Rhode Island African Americans, and it is a record of the hardships, crises, trials, and triumphs of her people and her time."--BOOK JACKET.