“when they burned the library of Alexandria the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire, and something truer than words, and it was ashes”
-a person on Twitter joking about the change to the Guitar Center logo
Freewater is a pretty great read, and easily the best medalist of the 2020s so far. Amina Luqman-Dawson's 2023 medalist juggles so many storylines and characters so well - each chapter rotates through a different character’s point of view - that, as the novel built towards its big climactic scene at a plantation wedding, I felt this ratcheting tension in my gut not only out of concern for Luqman-Dawson's characters, but out of the uncertainty around how she was going to lash all of these stories together. Rest assured that she pulls it off.
Freewater starts with Homer and Ada, two slave children in the antebellum mid-Atlantic, making a break for it with their mother in the dead of night. While the mother is caught and dragged back to the plantation, Homer and Ada are saved by a marauding, bow-wielding and knife-throwing swamp man who's been dedicating his life to robbing plantations and getting revenge on slaveholders. Suleman is a pretty badass character to put in a children’s novel about slavery.
Suleman, of course, isn’t about to return the children to the plantation, so he takes them to Freewater, which, as it turns out, is a hidden colony within the Great Dismal Swamp - it’s a real place and really named that1 - where escaped slaves and children born into freedom have been living off of the land and hiding from their former owners. It’s unthinkable and unimaginable and surrounded by deadly booby traps and hidden tunnels, and it’s a place where Homer and Ada can be free. Freewater, specifically, wasn’t a real place, but there really were tiny villages of escaped slaves hiding throughout the Great Dismal. As Luqman-Dawson wrote in her afterword to the novel:
“Enslaved women, men, and children found a multitude of ways big and small to resist and escape bondage. We usually learn about them escaping North or to Canada. Lesser known are those who found refuge deep in the swamps and forests of the American South and even began secret communities. Research and historical literature refer to these secret communities as “maroon communities” and the people who resided in them as “maroons.” Although Freewater is from my imagination, it’s inspired by the Great Dismal Swamp and the enslaved souls who found refuge and freedom within its confines.”
And while that resistance is at the center of Freewater, and while we’ll return to it later in the essay, it’s worth staying here for a minute and talking about just how good this was to read. Because the story is about more than Homer, Ada, and Freewater. It’s about their mom, Rose, dragged back to the plantation and wondering whether she’ll see her children ever again, or if they’re even alive. And it’s about Anna, the slave girl that Homer was supposed to take with in the escape, wondering why her friend abandoned her. And it’s about Sanzi, the young girl at Freewater who dreams of being a marauder like Suleman but nobody will take her seriously. And it’s about the overseers still cutting through the swamp trying to find their lost property. And it’s about the plantation getting ready for a giant wedding, all while Homer is thinking of a way to get back to his mother and Anna is trying to find a way to get out and Sanzi is trying to find a way to prove herself and Suleman is about to go on his next raid and Rose is trying to get back to her kids. All of these plotlines converge at the wedding, in a thrilling 400-page novel that never feels plodding or too long.
What’s especially striking to me is how Luqman-Dawson communicates the horrors of living as a slave; there’s a lot of action in the novel, but not the gruesome violence of, for instance, The Slave Dancer, and not the direct, textbook “this is what racism is” dialogue of something like Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry2. Luqman-Dawson will dance around every obvious reference she could make and then suddenly land a body blow and make you see some aspect of slavery that you had never thought about before. Take this passage, in which Mrs. Crumb - the wife of the plantation owner - is helping her daughter Nora get fitted for her bridesmaid dress while Rose - the plantation’s cook, and Homer and Ada’s mother - is in the room:
“‘Stand still!’ said Mrs. Crumb. But Nora continued. ‘If you won’t stand still, you’ll have to sit,’ said an exasperated Mrs. Crumb, and in one quick movement she held tight to her daughter’s shoulders and sat her right down onto Rose’s bent back. It all happened so fast Nora wasn’t quite sure what to do. The most imperceptible exhale of air escaped Rose’s nostrils. For an instant Rose glanced up at Mrs. Crumb. Then she averted her eyes solidly to the floor. Nora tried standing up and her mother pushed her back down…Through Rose’s threadbare dress, Nora could feel Braille-like scabs across her back, marks thick as the cord Papa used to tie up their porch swing…Nora peered down. Silent tears spilled from Rose’s face and dripped into the rug beneath her. As if struck by lightning, Nora jumped off and ran.”
I’ve read a lot of books about slavery, including for this project, but I’ve never read “we just suddenly decide to use the slaves as furniture when we need something in a pinch” before, and that image is going to stay with me, as is the Crumb parent’s generous choice of wedding gift for their daughter on her wedding day:
“‘Well, we want to make sure Viola takes a bit of home with her as she goes.” Master Crumb continued. ‘I see from all the empty plates that y’all enjoyed the food. Well, Viola’s been enjoying this food her whole life, and we want to keep it that way. So, sweetheart, tonight we’re giving you our cook to take to your new home. She’ll go with you this very evening so that every day of your new life, you can think of your family here at Southerland.’”
Viola is overjoyed and hugs her daddy of course, and also in all of the books I’ve read about slavery I’ve never seen an adult woman given away as a wedding present on the spot. That’s horrifying, horrifying in a new way to me, horrifying in a way that’s going to stick with me. So is one of the Freewater running into a white man in the swamp, immediately crumpling into a ball, and stammering “he f-f-found me”. So is one of the free-born children next to him meeting a white man’s gaze for the first time:
“But what shook her to the core was the feeling she got from the man’s stare. It felt like he’d seen right through her. Like the Juna she’d been all of her life didn’t exist anymore. She was no longer her mother’s protégé, nor beautiful, nor a sister, nor a friend, she was gone. A thunderclap of fear coursed through her veins and turned them ice cold. She thought she’d known that feeling, but in an instant she understood that she’d lived a life with very little fear.”
Just like Lois Lowry did in The Giver, Luqman-Dawson can make you feel a lot of dread by showing you what isn’t there - this character, Juna, was born in Freewater, and it’s through her realization that we realize just how scarred everyone else must be, how different a life this must have been from everything we’ve ever known. It’s devastating and brilliant.
So what do we do in the face of all of this horror? Fight darkness with light? Mercy, compassion, forgiveness, nonviolent resistance, the power of love that can overcome hatred? Nah man, we’re gonna burn the plantation down.
At the beginning of this “season” of Newburied, I read Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry and ended on its lesson about fury, about how we might need to “get comfortable in your fury. You’re going to need it once the land starts burning.” During the raid (slash rescue mission, slash escape mission, slash supply run) to the Southerland plantation, every plan goes awry and everyone has to improvise and escape and scramble, but ultimately Suleman and Sanzi start firing burning arrows into the giant tent in which the wedding reception is being held, everyone who went to raid the plantation gets out, and a lot of other enslaved people take the opportunity to run to the swamp in the chaos as well. Southerland is left in ruins, the wealth and home of a family reduced to cinders. It kicks ass.
I’ve talked a lot about what I hope stories like these can teach my children, and what they taught me when I was a child. The overarching theme I had back when I read the very first book was “the world is bigger than you think, and you’re not alone in it”, and I do really hope that my children read stories that teach them that, and that they learn to be compassionate people who seek to understand and care for others.
The children in Freewater didn’t get those stories growing up. The lucky ones got to see a community of people like them living in freedom, and the unlucky ones got to see their friends and family get beaten every day. But they know what freedom is, and they know what they have to burn down to get it. When Homer is almost recaptured by the overseer Stokes during the raid, he talks about the habits he picked up when working on the plantation, and how all of that gets thrown out of the window: “There was no being smart, no thinking things through, and no disappearing myself away. Freedom was the only thing my body understood. I swung my arms and kicked at Stokes.”
In the face of the tremendous evils of chattel slavery, there was an understanding of freedom and a need for resistance that went far deeper than any stories that expose us to the big exciting world. As Luqman-Dawson put it in her afterword, “This history is a reminder that wherever African enslavement existed in the Americas, a culture (and even communities) of extraordinary resistance was always present.”
As I'm writing this essay, college students across the country are protesting against a genocide that our government is funding and supporting, just like college students did in the sixties; for voicing their dissent, they are facing arrests and police violence and expulsion, just like college students did in the sixties. My daughters are growing up in a world where police bash your skull in if you try to protest at an inconvenient time. They have fewer rights than they had when they were born. They do not live in a country where the government transitions power peacefully. I wanted to read all of these medalists so I could learn what stories to tell them as they grow up in a world that’s getting worse, in a world that feels like it’s ending. I hope that they grow up knowing that extraordinary resistance can matter, that people who had less than we did did more than we’re doing right now, that radical action matters. Words and stories are powerful. Fire’s pretty powerful too.
One book left.
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 2024 medalist, The Eyes & The Impossible by Dave Eggers.
The album The Great Dismal, by Philadelphia shoegaze band Nothing, is named after the swamp, not the other way around.
Which is about post-bellum racism, but most of the same rules apply.