African Town

by Charles Waters, Irene Latham

Genres: YA Historical Fiction; YA Literary Fiction; African American; Southern

Synopsis

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.

 

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Release date: January 4, 2022

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 448

Sample

I.

HOME IS WHERE THE STORY IS

AFRICAN TOWN, ALABAMA, 1901

 

KOSSOLAOUR STORY

Be still, my children. Listen with your ears

and your heart. Our story starts with this

mark on my right cheek, these chipped teeth.

See? This is how you know I am who I say I am.

De town where I was born is called Bantè.

It’s nowhere near here, not in African Town, not

in Alabama. This town’s way across de ocean,

on de west coast of Africa in de kingdom

of Dahomey. My family’s home was a round,

two-story adobe with a terrace. Surrounded by hills,

about eight days’ walk to de sea. Someday maybe

you will see de world de way I have seen it

in Bantè. Then you will know how de sun

kisses de earth, melts like honey over de land—

it’s no wonder I believed all of life would be

bright and sweet. No wonder it still shocks me

that de world can be so hard, so dark.

But that darkness, it brought me here.

It brought you here. This is our story.