Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas.
Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage.
Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour de force that tells the “powerful” ( The New York Times Book Review) story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. These stories have remained incomplete due to centuries of erasure, but Hall and Martinez fill in the blanks in stark black and white.A Best Book of 2021 by NPR and The Washington Post Women’s voices, particularly those of black women, are absent from much of the historical record, Hall writes, because the people keeping records in the past didn’t view them as worth listening to, let along recording for posterity. Artist Hugo Martinez weaves powerful images of 18th-century life-slave auctions where condos now stand, nooses reflected in the windshield of a police cars-beautifully encapsulating Hall’s line “Invisible forces shaped everything around you.This is what it means to live in the wake of slavery.” These shouldn’t be controversial ideas, but they’ve been made that way by folks who’d chose ignorance over knowledge, denial over acceptance, and lies over truth. These kinds of stories are usually told as the result of an historian’s research, but Hall takes us along on the journey of gathering clues before she attempts to fill in the missing pieces. We follow her as she tries to account for the erasure of black women’s voices in the histories of slave revolts in her native New York City, and watching her journey into dusty archives and archaic 18th -century legalese has the feel of a gumshoe digging into a particularly difficult case.
Rebecca Hall writes about history like it’s a hard boiled detective story: “Sometimes, when you’re hunting down the past, the past is hunting you,” she says.
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