1951: AMOS FORTUNE, FREE MAN by Elizabeth Yates, with illustrations by Nora S. Unwin
Night came down swiftly over the equatorial forest.
For multiple reasons, I don’t love living inside a Louis CK bit, but we really are living inside his old one-liner “every year, white people add fifty years to how long ago slavery was.” The 2021 and early 2022 push to ban books across schools and libraries for teaching “critical race theory” was aimed, primarily, at books that took the bold stance that white Americans did not always treat black Americans super-well, and that this fact, and the structures and precedents we set up during that era of not treating black Americans super-well, might still have relevance to the things happening in our country today. State governments are banning a new AP course on black history, to prevent students from thinking or talking about this reality. Some of the reasons for all of this are very insidious, and then some are a lot dumber: one of the arguments that these people make, as we saw in the fight over banning 2020 medalist New Kid, was “hey come on man it’s not like I owned slaves or am personally racist, so I would personally never like to think about racism at any point in my life."
To over-simplify and summarize: we want to forget so bad. We want to pretend that nothing bad ever happened, that people were never hurt, that living in this world today doesn't require us to know about that and sacrifice and change things to finally, finally stop the reverberations of the atrocities in our past. We want to forget so that we can feel comfortable. That's a natural instinct, but one we have to work against if we want to make the world better.
The 1951 Newbery medalist is Elizabeth Yates' nonfiction biography of Amos Fortune, a man who was captured in Africa and enslaved in 18th-century New England, before finally gaining his freedom and building a new life for himself and his loved ones. It is meant to be an inspirational up-from-slavery story, and it mostly succeeds at being that. It is perhaps not the most representative story out there on 18th-century American slavery, but it works for what it is, and it helps us remember some parts of our past that we want to forget.
More importantly, it's about a man who refused to forget who he was and what he could be. Because if there's one takeaway from Amos Fortune: Free Man, it's that we want to forget so bad, but even more than that, we want to make other people forget, too.
I’m willing to give Yates a pass on one of the major plot points, since she is writing about real people: Amos Fortune, for a slave, got dealt a pretty good hand. I mean, he was still human chattel with no rights of any kind, but both of his owners in Massachusetts were Quakers who were both pretty up front that they were planning to give Fortune his manumission papers after a few years of labor. They taught him how to read the Bible and treated him with, well, as much “respect” as you can treat someone whom you own as property; as his first owner put it, “he’ll have his freedom in time, but not until he’s paid me well for the price I paid for him”. None of that is, you know, good in a moral sense, but it is a lot better than a lot of other slaves were facing. Fortune’s story is a true story, but it’s not the story you’d necessarily tell to explain to someone what life was like for most slaves.
Similarly, Fortune’s fate is a true story, but it’s also way better than most slaves ever had the chance to reach. Fortune did eventually buy his own freedom at age sixty - which we reach at about the halfway point in the book - and dedicated the rest of his life to buying the freedom of others, including his wives (he was widowed twice and married three times) and his daughter. He moved to New Hampshire, where he established a successful leather tanning business, bought a piece of land, and built his own home on it. He became a prominent and beloved member of the small town of Jaffrey, helped establish the town’s first library, and bequeathed part of his assets to establishing an educational fund in the town, which is still maintained by the Jaffrey Public Library centuries later, in his name. His headstone reads that he “purchased Liberty, professed Christianity, lived reputably, and died hopefully”. Because of his legacy in New Hampshire, and because Yates’ Newbery-winning biography is in the canon of children’s literature, Amos Fortune is one of the former slaves, of countless others who were captured and brought to America, that we remember today.
We remember him, ultimately, because he got lucky. There were many other Africans brought over to America that would have been just as smart and worked just as hard but that got sold to much crueler owners and so never got the chance to live like human beings. So, on the one hand, Amos Fortune: Free Man doesn't work as a particularly universal or informative slavery narrative, since it hinges on the presence and mercy of "good white people", and while there were good white people in this era, there definitely weren't a lot, especially in the slaveholding class. It's likely part of the reason Yates' book doesn't find its way into many lesson plans today, even though it does make for a pretty good read. It's also likely part of the reason this book doesn't get challenged or banned to the same extent as other childrens' slavery narratives; there are just a lot of good white people here. I’m willing to cut Yates a little bit of slack on this, for two reasons: first, this did all really happen, Amos Fortune just happened to run in to a bunch of good white people during his life. And second, Yates does take some time to show us what the other white people were like.
Amos Fortune was born as Prince At-mun in Africa, and in the first chapter of the book his tribal celebration is invaded by white slavers looking to score the latest merchandise. He’s transported in chains up through the Middle Passage to the new world, in a ship crammed full of other dying Africans, whom the slavers have made every attempt to strip of their humanity. People with their own self-governing villages were treated like animals so that they would forget what it was like to be human:
“From time to time, as more raise were made into the interior, more captives were brought back and thrown into the pits. Some were from tribes the At-mun-shi had known as friendly neighbors. Others were ones against whom they had often defended themselves. Still others were unknown. But differences or similarities mattered little in the pits and even language made small bond. Frightened and angry, the captives milled around in their confinement. They fought for the food thrown down to them and had neither hate nor friendship in common, only an animal instinct to survive, though for what end no one knew.”
This is the most powerful weapon that the slavers had: the power to force their captives to forget who they were, who their allies were, anything about themselves that might lead them to think that they didn’t deserve to be treated this way, anything about themselves that might make them want their freedom, make them not afraid to want something more than this awful servitude. As At-mun rides in the ship, his own tribesmen fall victim to this:
“...as the days passed they seemed less and less able to respond to him and eyes that had once looked at him with reverence looked at him in a daze, then looked away. The time came when the eyes looking into his bore no recognition in their glance…they stood in a long patient row, like animals trained at last to obey commands. The traders were please at what the time and treatment in the pits had done. For the African tribesmen and women now were what they wanted them to be - merchandise that could be exchanged for merchandise…they had been made to forget - not only that they were At-mun-shi but that they were men.”
Some of us want to forget our past so bad, because we don’t want to be held accountable for it, or because we don’t want to feel uncomfortable, or because we don’t want to have to change anything to make sure it will never happen again. And then some of us want other people to forget so bad, forget what we once did to them, because if they can forget, we can still take advantage of them pretty easily. If we can forget and if they can forget, then we can still get away with paying them pennies for prison labor and keeping them from voting and killing them when they don’t do the things we want. There’s nobody speaking out against an evil that nobody remembers, there’s no conscience telling us that we must be on the wrong path because of what didn’t happen before.
At-mun - Amos - refuses to forget who he is. On the ship to the new world, “he compelled himself to remember as far back as he could in the past that he might have something more than his body to carry into the future.” And he can’t forget, because as his first Quaker family is reading to him from the Bible, he hears the words “Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us Kings and priests unto God”. That verse, that reminder that he had been born a king in more ways than one, causes something to snap inside Amos, and coupled with his determination to remember something, anything, about his past, he begins the journey to buying his own freedom and the freedom of the people he loves. He was born a king. He has to do great things. As he buys his plot of land in New Hampshire, he reflects:
“He was going far too from the memory of toil as another’s chattel, from indignity and privation and the long slow years of servitude. He no longer had his youth…but he still had his vision; a compound of words read by a little Quaker girl in a clear voice, words that had burned themselves into his mind and burned away the shackles hate had put to his lips…In his memory he knew he had been born a king, but it was the little Roxanna reading from the Bible who had shown him the only way that he could become a king. So he had lived his life thereafter and so he would continue to live it as long as strength and manhood lasted within him.”
We want to forget so bad; we want other people to forget, too. Amos Fortune was a man who would not let himself forget who he was, and because he was able to keep that memory burning inside of him, he became the hero still remembered in New Hampshire today. Yates’ story is not perfect, and it probably wouldn’t be my first choice for a narrative about slavery in America, but it is an important narrative about remembering, one that can keep us from forgetting what happened, one that can tell us that we’re supposed to be better than this, and like every great Newbery winner, it can give us something to carry forward into the future.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2016 medalist, Last Stop On Market Street by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson.