African Town by Irene Latham and Charles Waters

African Town by Irene Latham and Charles Waters

Book is in good condition! There is light wear from use. There is a white sticker inside the back cover. The pages are clean with no marks.

African Town is a captivating and poignant historical novel-in-verse that chronicles the journey of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860. Despite the United States outlawing the importation of enslaved laborers, a group of 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were unlawfully captured and transported to Mobile, Alabama aboard the Clotilda ship. This harrowing voyage encompassed the brutal Middle Passage and involved concealing the captives in the swamplands along the Alabama River. Eventually, they were discreetly dispersed amongst various plantations, where they struggled to preserve their cultural identity while adapting to their captive environment. Following the end of the Civil War, these survivors established a community known as African Town, which persists to this day. Presented through the voices of 14 distinct narrators, including the ship that transported them and the founder of African Town, this historical novel-in-verse profoundly captures a pivotal moment in both US and world history, whose reverberations continue to be felt in the present.

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