THE BLACK SCHOONER

The story of the Amistad, told through African eyes.

In 1839, a group of enslaved Africans shackled on board a ship bound for a Cuban plantation rebelled boldly and bravely against the boat’s crew, killing the captain and holding their Spanish enslavers hostage. They steered the ship north—arriving nine weeks later in Montauk, New York. Slavery was illegal in New York, but the Spanish enslavers wanted the Africans tried for murder and piracy. But how could these “black pirates, these enemies of all mankind…[commit] a crime against property by stealing themselves?” Could they instead be seen as “victims of piratical slave traders [whose] sole objective was to free themselves from unlawful bondage?” These profound and fascinating legal and ethical questions are raised and explored in this sharp, insightful graphic retelling—largely interpolated from courtroom proceedings and other primary source material. The experience of the Amistad’s African mutineers is rightly centered here—the violent terms of their enslavement, the planning of the rebellion, the experience of being imprisoned even as free men, and ultimately their bittersweet return to Sierra Leone, diminished in numbers and forever changed by their experience. Adapted from Rediker’s 2012 history The Amistad Rebellion, this book examines how the Africans’ cause was embraced by American abolitionists, who saw the question of personhood as essential to ending slavery in a deeply divided United States, while also seeking to assimilate Africans to their own concept of Christianity. Lester’s well-suited illustrations are sketchy, heavily shadowed and roughly crosshatched, and add a heightened sense of emotional tension and inescapable immediacy that resonates across the centuries of racial reckoning to come.

An evocative, incisive, and powerful piece of graphic history.