One especially bitter truth about the capture and enslavement of Africans brought to the New World is this: the identities of those who profited from it and those structures that upheld it were designed to be unremarkable.
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One of the first books to break through this fiction was the 1981 book There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. Written by Vincent Harding, a historian, activist and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr, the book helped shatter the myth of the docile, happy slave described by slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson (in quotes you’ll never find in Hamilton).
Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s graphic book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, embraces a more significant, more authentic history of resistance. It highlights the deep, unhealed, intergenerational pain of rape, torture and death that was the lot of untold women.
Hall has offered up this ancestral pain and used it as a lens through which we might attend to those previously rendered invisible. The book’s unmistakable and unapologetic power is amplified by Martínez, a New Orleans-based graphic artist and illustrator. His artwork is reminiscent of woodblock, with all the energy of a superhero comic. His work evokes multiple symbols. Slave ships power through waves that look like both water and flames. They are an excellent accompaniment to Hall’s stories within the story.
Hall, a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, combines a narrative of her own family life and ancestors with the sometimes-maddening search for enslaved women who died rather than being kept captive. The resulting story is part autobiography, part Forensic Files. When all is said and done, Hall has tracked the evidence of crimes against humanity.
First and foremost, she confesses she is haunted: “Sometimes when you think you’re hunting down the past… The past is hunting you. I was born to tell the stories.”
Walking the streets of New York City, she describes what it is like to live in the wake of slavery – which is, in fact, all around us. As a tenants’ rights lawyer, she was immersed in the consistent injustices rooted in racism, encoded in everything she touched. This reality sent her back to school to earn her PhD in history, focusing on race and gender in America.