This later period is where “The Last Slave Ship” adds new fuel to the conversation about the history of slavery, the search for the Clotilda and reconciliation. Raines doesn’t get to deploy this type of scene setting often, but when he does, the narrative is tethered to the landscape, and the book flourishes under his pen in these moments.Įarly on Raines walks the well-tread path of storytellers and historians before him, but most of their narratives stop in the 1950s and focus on the time before and during enslavement. The big moon would have made for eerie silhouettes that night, coal-black against its brightness.”
Hanging overhead, cypress and tupelo trees drip with stalactites of Spanish moss. “(T)he shores are lined with a thick and marshy strand of bulrushes, wild rice and cattails, chest-high and difficult to walk through. Raines, an environmental journalist with knowledge of Alabama’s swamps, deltas and hideaways, writes about one of the first landscapes the enslaved encountered in the swamps of Alabama. Often the Americans made fun of the Africans, even one hundred years later.”įrom shell-paved roads to groves of magnolias and orange trees, one of the strengths of the book is the well-described landscape. They tried to talk to the American-born Black people they encountered on the plantations, but couldn’t bridge the language gap. “Everyone and everything seemed so strange to the Africans. Raines’ retelling spends time humanizing people that were often seen as outliers because of their facial tattoos and other proclivities that marked them as being “other” in a world that struggled with anything beyond nuance.
0 kommentar(er)
