Common Sense Note
This moderately graphic depiction of the worst of the slave trade, told exclusively from a white boy's point of view, will raise many questions, both historical and moral. Though the reading level is middle to upper elementary, sensitive children may find it very disturbing.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Matt Berman
The somewhat awkward device of Jessie's kidnapping allows the author to look at the slave trade from the point of view of an innocent. Jessie, neither slave, slave owner, nor slave trader, an empathetic boy brought up in genteel poverty in a majority-black city, can relate to what he sees with just revulsion, and without hypocrisy or complicity, though the complete lack of any sort of racism in this son of the pre-Civil War South strains credulity a bit. But it's necessary to allow him to provide young readers with an emotional point of entry to a grotesque and alien world.
Author Fox does not pull many punches -- the depiction of the methods of the trade is clear and thoroughly researched, though an Author's Note about that research would have been welcome. She also makes clear the impact of involvement in the trade, from the debasement and brutality of the sailors to the lifelong emotional impact of the experience on Jessie, vividly and lyrically portrayed in an epilogue.
From the Book:
Time softened my memory as though it was kneading wax. But there was one thing that did not yield to time.
I was unable to listen to music ... For at the first note of a tune or of a song, I would see once again as though they'd never ceased their dancing in my mind, black men and women and children lifting their tormented limbs to a reedy martial air, the dust rising from their joyless thumping, the sound of the fife finally drowned beneath the clanging of their chains.
Plot Summary:
Kidnapped in New Orleans, Jessie is forced aboard a slave ship bound for Africa, where he is required both to act as a ship's boy and, when the slaves are brought on board, to play his fife while they are "danced" -- that is, forced to exercise. On the ship he meets the vicious and greedy captain, and the sullen and contentious crew.
But the rigors of the trip west across the Atlantic, including the brutal and unjust flogging of one of the sailors, do not prepare him for the horrors of the return trip, as the slaves are packed into the hold on top of each other, brutalized, malnourished, thrown overboard when they die, and forced to dance to the sound of Jessie's fife.
Related Books:
Other Books by Paula Fox
A Likely Place
A Place Apart
Blowfish Live in the Sea
The King's Falcon
Lily and the Lost Boy
Maurice's Room
One-Eyed Cat
Portrait of Ivan
The Moonlight Man
The Village by the Sea
Radiance Descending
Other Books About Slavery
Steal Away by Jennifer Armstrong
Ajeemah and his Son by James Berry
Melitte by Fatima Shaik
I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl, Mars Bluff, South Carolina, 1865 by Joyce Hansen
Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen
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Sexual ContentMany of the slaves are naked, and the sailors enjoy looking at them. Jessie peeps through windows at women undressing. |
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ViolenceThe book is necessarily filled with graphic violence, none of it gratuitous, from floggings and beatings to murder by shooting and throwing overboard. |
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LanguageThe racial epithet beginning with n is used frequently. |
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Social BehaviorThe behavior of the sailors, toward each other and toward the slaves, is appalling. The slaves are beaten and starved, and humiliated. |
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Commercialism |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoQuite a bit of drinking and drunkenness on the part of the sailors, who also give young Jessie beer, which he doesn't like. |
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