AfricanTown

 

My Thoughts:

This novel in verse is a work of fiction created from historical events around the true story of the last American slave ship. Taking a myriad of voices, both animate and inanimate, including the ship,  the poems from their voices reveal a more chilling history because of the way the authors vary the voices. I think it is also so haunting because the poems keep rolling in like a dark tide. I definitely had to stop reading and put it down for a bit. Guess what, the story doesn't get more palatable. The voices, even the ships, are highly personal. As a reader, I feel their fear, There is no redemption. 

Still, this is a great way to immerse readers into the horror of slavery through the eyes of those involved both directly and indirectly. It makes the research that should go alongside this more immediate and present.  

From the Publisher:

Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse.

In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.