Abstract
Although children’s literature has long alluded to cultural connections between Africans and African Americans, very few texts establish clear lines of influence between particular African ethnic groups and African American characters and communities. Joyce Hansen’s The Captive (1994) and Sharon Draper’s Copper Sun (2006) stand out in portraying protagonists Kofi’s and Amari’s reliance on their past upbringing as Ashanti and Ewe, respectively. As Kofi and Amari endure the traumas of the Middle Passage and slavery in eighteenth-century America, they adapt by relying on their past socialization in traditional West African societies. The two novels challenge the idea of cultural erasure promoted in Elizabeth Yates’ Amos Fortune, Free Man (1950), which is still a fixture on multicultural reading lists for middle school students. The Captive and Copper Sun do provide sharply contrasting visions of their protagonist’s relationships to American society. Copper Sun indicates that a black girl’s concerns, including her need for subsistence and protection, and her desire for creative expression and personal autonomy, can complement the economic and military interests of the state. By contrast, The Captive insists on the necessity for its emancipated protagonist to maintain an adversarial role within a stratified, white-dominated U.S. culture. The novels thus highlight the very different messages about social identity and participation that recent multicultural children’s literature can convey.
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Notes
Arna Bontemps’ Story of the Negro (1948) stands out from early twentieth-century African American texts for its straightforward representation of black African agency on both sides of the Atlantic and during the Middle Passage, for what Dianne Johnson has described as “the humanity of African peoples” and “the richness and diversity of this humanity” (Connolly, 2013, p. 164, 166; 1990, p. 51).
The phrase “school of slavery,” which appears in the post-bellum slave narratives of dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley and educator Booker T. Washington, is a productive metaphor for the socialization of Draper’s and Hansen’s protagonists. Keckley’s and Washington’s use of the term is problematic, downplaying slavery’s horror in order to promote the idea that it afforded enslaved persons skills that made them self-reliant and thus prepared for the challenges of post-bellum life (Keckley 1868, pp. 19–20, Washington, 1999/1901, p. 37). See Schwebel, 2011, p. 100 and Foster, 1993, pp. 118–119, for discussions of the commonality of the assumption that slavery was a training ground. Yet their metaphor can be adapted to encompass the wide range of lessons that African American slaves encountered. Although formal education was not provided for most enslaved children during the antebellum era, slaves had to learn agricultural, domestic, artisan, mechanical, or “unskilled” tasks, lessons about social place and self-abnegation, and the often competing, empowering teachings of the black vernacular.
For an informative discussion of West African spiritual writing, see Gundaker, 1998, pp. 33–46.
In this manner, Amari’s experience recalls that of protagonists in a tradition of African American women’s writing, including Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.
See, for instance, his Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries.
Draper’s novel has had much success, winning the 2007 Coretta Scott King Award and since then having been used in an exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Museum, and chosen by the U.S. State department for an international reading program (Draper, 2015, n.p.). The Captive, a CSK Honor Book in 1995, has been out of print at least since 2006, when I purchased a used copy.
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Karen Michele Chandler teaches American and African American literature at the University of Louisville. She is currently writing a book about African American history in children’s literature.
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Chandler, K.M. Surviving the “School of Slavery”: Acculturation in Sharon Draper’s Copper Sun and Joyce Hansen’s The Captive . Child Lit Educ 47, 77–92 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9258-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9258-y