In the last pages of her debut book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History (2022, New), journalist Jori Lewis breaks the fourth wall to bring readers into the present and share a story from her reporting process. The archives she had mined were rich with stories of a village called Kerbala—an outpost of French control on the westernmost coast of Africa which thrived at a time when France controlled all of what is now Senegal and much of West Africa. Kerbala had been a haven for freed slaves who had escaped bondage further inland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But more than a century after its heyday, the village had very nearly disappeared into the landscape. Still, the journalist writes, she wanted to see whatever was left of it for herself, so she took a cab inland from her base in Senegal’s coastal capital of Dakar before riding a horse-drawn cart to a remote village. There, she met an old man who, she was told, might know where the village once stood. The mood was a bit desperate, and the author tempered her optimism: there was no reason to suspect that even the area’s oldest resident would remember the stories of people who “weren’t warriors or princes or learned clerics.” And in fact, after some careful thought, the man said he had no recollection of it. Instead, he said a prayer for the author: that Allah would help her find what she was searching for. Lewis thanked him in two languages, and then, she writes in the last words of the book, “I continued along my way.” It’s a fitting end to a story about a people who, beyond being forgotten, were scarcely remembered in the first place.