Belinda's Book Club

Calling all book lovers, history buffs, and those who just love being in community – Join the Royall House and Slave Quarters and Frugal Bookstore for Belinda’s Book Club!

Belinda’s Book Club is a quarterly traveling book club open to all ages to read Black authors whose stories are connected to Massachusetts and discuss these works’ connections to our contemporary experiences. This book club honors Belinda Sutton, a Ghanaian woman enslaved by the Royalls who petitioned multiple times for reparations for her labor.

Our first meeting is at the Royall House and Slave Quarters (15 George St, Medford, MA 02155) on October 22, 2026 from 6:30PM-8PM, where we will be reading Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black by Harriet Wilson, a free Black woman, speaker, and spiritualist who lived and published her autobiography in Boston. Refreshments will be provided.

Support our bookstore partner Frugal Bookstore (57 Warren St, Roxbury, MA 02119) by buying from them in person or online: bit.ly/BuyFrugal

Starting on Monday, the first seven people to visit Frugal Bookstore and show their registration will receive a free copy of the book courtesy of the Royall House and Slave Quarters! For those unable to purchase the book, a free online copy is also available via Internet Archive.

ABOUT THE ROYALL HOUSE & SLAVE QUARTERS

The Royall House and Slave Quarters functions as a site of memory. In the eighteenth century, the plantation was home to the Royalls, the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts, and at least sixty enslaved women, men, and children whose forced labor helped build the Royall family’s wealth. As one of the only remaining freestanding quarters where enslaved people lived and worked in the North, the museum bears witness to their lives, to the intertwined stories of wealth and bondage in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts, and to the resistance and political and legal activism of enslaved and free Black people in the eighteenth century.