Aramenta Burgwyn, born the privileged daughter of a Southern planter before the Civil War, has long harbored a quiet suspicion: her mother is not white, but Henrietta, a striking, mixed-race slave. When her father dies, her aunt seizes the estate and Aramenta is sold into slavery.
Reborn as Sayla, she must navigate the horrors of bondage and the fractured landscape of the Civil War. Through brutality, betrayal, and unimaginable hardship, Sayla fights for freedom, identity, and dignity, carving a path toward a life she refuses to surrender. Across continents, Julian, her childhood friend and first love, must navigate the tides of war and exile to find her.
Sayla Is My Name is a vivid, unflinching tale of courage, resilience, and the struggle to claim one’s humanity in a world determined to deny it.

Praise for Sayla Is My Name

“As a lifelong writer, teacher, and critic of Southern literature myself, I came to this novel with a great deal of background, interest, and some doubt. What’s left to say? A lot, I’ll tell you! Sayla Is My Name is an historical novel unlike any other that I have ever read in its extraordinary immersion in all the details of time and place, thereby avoiding stereotypes and making the characters come to astonishing life, Black and white alike, horribly or beautifully, yet always memorably. The reader is totally THERE, immersed in time, place, personalities and the action of the story. Sayla’s complex journey through slavery and its aftermath is one which I literally could not put down, finding surprise (or love, understanding, horror, or enlightenment) on every page.”

—Lee Smith, author of On Agate Hill and The Last Girls

“Walter Bennett’s new novel is at once compelling and shockingly new in its portrayal of the facts of slavery. No one, in my knowledge, has been able to show how the life of a human being of mixed race could invoke the fury of this era. The book is filled with terrific story-telling, drama, scale, and a sure, keen morality you can trust. It is written with a fearless voice and bravery, a keen sense of right and wrong, and with the stature equal to the task. At once dramatic, moving and unforgettable.”

—Craig Nova, author of The Good Son and Cruisers

“This novel joins a very small group of recent American books that help contemporary readers better understand the chaos, calamity, and cruelty of the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. Walter Bennett’s Sayla Is My Name easily stands as a peer with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and Erik Larson’s Demon of Unrest. Ranging from piedmont North Carolina to the Caribbean, Bennett’s haunting story conveys what it was like to be a privileged, classically-educated child of the era, but born of the union of master and slave. Sayla’s drunken and lovesick father aims for his daughter to pass as white on his plantation, but the local community knows otherwise. Claiming her African roots comes gradually and then violently, while Sayla still manages to dream of freeing her mother’s people from bondage. In Bennett’s sensitive and able hands this gripping story of rape, disfigurement, and shattering trauma rings true with astonishing historical detail and page-turning power.”

—Georgann Eubanks, author of The Miraculous Ordinary and Literary Trails of North Carolina

“Not since Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain have I read such a powerful novel of the Civil War and its interior and geographic journeys. Award-winning novelist Walter Bennett takes on a subject worthy of Faulkner: What happens when the light-skinned, mixed-race daughter of a white man, raised and educated as his own, is captured and sold into slavery? Aramenta’s journey into a brutal world takes us aboard ship to England, navigates the slave trade in the Caribbean islands, and finally brings us home to the hardscrabble aftermath of the war in the fictional town of Pray, North Carolina. Aramenta and her white lover Julian lead us to an understanding of the depth of her ignorance and our own, as they bear witness up close to the many ways human hearts become hopelessly twisted when they engage in the enslavement of others. Ultimately, this journey becomes a spiritual call for one young woman to burn her white self to ashes, to survive and rise as fully human only by becoming Black. I read this riveting tale long into the night, cheering Aramenta and her lover on through their life-or-death struggles. Bennett sings this difficult journey with the accuracy and language of an epic poet; this is an American odyssey newly sung.”

—Marjorie Hudson, author of Indigo Field and Searching for Virginia Dare