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Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts
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84/99
Critics' Rating Index
84/99
Readers' Rating Index
89/99
Scholars' Citation Index
89/99
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About This Book
Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour-de-force that tells the story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall's efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. Wake tells the story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain's logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the "negro burying ground" uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere. Using in-depth archival research and a measured use of historical imagination, Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. We also follow Rebecca's own story as the legacy of slavery shapes life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her. Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Art Spiegelman's Maus. The story of both a personal and national legacy, it is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.
Reviews
"They are an excellent accompaniment to Hall's stories within the story ..."
"Plus, his roomy panels and full pages leave space to breathe, and to reflect."
"is operating in the wake of slavery, and in a state of being awake to the past, a process Hall frames as both devastating and grounding."
"Her actions, her embodiment, her movement through the world, all dramatize the complexities of being a Black woman in a white supremacist patriarchy ..."
"Illustrator Martínez works in stark black strokes to convey the urgency of this ugly legacy."
"Underscoring Hall's insistence that we live in history's wake, a single frame often encompasses multiple worlds—an eighteenth-century gallows reflected in the window of an NYPD van, a contemporary construction site reminiscent of the sinewy, roiling sea people were forced to travel in chains."
"The emotional power of creating characters, settings, visual pacing are singularly missing from the art form, which contents itself with visually echoing the text rather than expanding beyond it."
"He draws all sorts of complex scenes—from the interior of a log cabin in Nebraska to an Ahogi cavalry charge (a frontal view, no less!)—seemingly effortlessly ..."
"The black-and-white illustrations nicely complement the text and elevate the artfulness and the power of the book, which begins and ends with scenes depicting women-led revolts aboard a ship Hall calls the Unity."
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