Book excerpt: "This biography of Charles follows him from childhood in a Mississippi sharecropper?s cabin to his violent death on New Orleans? Saratoga Street. With the few clues available, William Ivy Hair has pieced together the story of a man whose life spanned the thirty-four years from emancipation to 1900?a man who tried to achieve dignity and self-respect in a time when people of his race could not exhibit such characteristics without fear of reprisal" -- publisher website (October 2006).