Middle Passage: White Ships/ Black Cargo

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Overview

The Middle Passage is the name given to one of the most tragic ordeals in history: the cruel and terrifying journey of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. In this seminal work, master artist Tom Feelings tells the complete story of this horrific diaspora in sixty-four extraordinary narrative paintings. Achingly real, they draw us into the lives of the millions of African men, women, and children who were savagely torn from their beautiful homelands, crowded into disease-ridden "death ships," and ...
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More About This Book

Overview

The Middle Passage is the name given to one of the most tragic ordeals in history: the cruel and terrifying journey of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. In this seminal work, master artist Tom Feelings tells the complete story of this horrific diaspora in sixty-four extraordinary narrative paintings. Achingly real, they draw us into the lives of the millions of African men, women, and children who were savagely torn from their beautiful homelands, crowded into disease-ridden "death ships," and transported under nightmarish conditions to the so-called New World. An introduction by noted historian Dr. John Henrik Clarke traces the roots of the Atlantic slave trade and gives a vivid summary of its four centuries of brutality. The Middle Passage reaches us on a visceral level. No one can experience it and remain unmoved. But while we absorb the horror of these images, we also can find some hope in them. They are a tribute to the survival of the human spirit, and the humanity won by the survivors of the Middle Passage belongs to us all.
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Editorial Reviews

Children's Literature - Karen Williams
This beautiful wordless book captures the silent scream of Africans on their way to the institution of slavery. Using pen and ink and tempera on rice paper, Tom Feelings hauntingly captures the pain of enslaved Africans as they journeyed through the middle passage from Africa to America. He tells the story in black and gray on white. These muted colors express the story of the Africans loss of freedom. The wordless plot includes the attack, capture, forced march, branding, life in the ship's hold, death at sea and auction on land. The power of the book lies in its silence. It speaks for a people who were not permitted to speak for themselves.
School Library Journal
Feelings's art speaks to the soul in this magnificent visual record of the Black Diaspora in the Americas. Clarke provides a concise narrative of the slave trade, and then readers pause at a double-spread image of a man, woman, bird, sun, and land before the pages become horrific. Guns, yokes, chains, whips, knives-one can see anger, grief, sadness, pain, and almost hear the screams coming from the captives' open mouths. The crowded holes, ankle chains, branding, rats, and sharks swarming around the ship as bodies are thrown overboard all build, image by image, to the reality of man's inhumanity to man. White enforcers are depicted more as wisps than as defined persons, while blacks are primarily drawn with sharp definition. The art is rendered in pen-and-ink and tempera on rice paper and printed in tritone (two black inks and one gray, plus a neutral press varnish). The satin feel of the thick, oversized pages; the black endpapers; the gray introductory and end matter; and pure white backgrounds for the journey itself demonstrate the care that went into the book's production. A powerfully rendered reality that all teens deserve the opportunity to experience.
-- Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA
Donna Seaman
In his introduction, Feelings, known best for his children's book celebrating African creativity, Soul Looks Back in Wonder (1993), explains why he chose to create this picture book for adults about the Middle Passage, the horrific transatlantic journey that brought enslaved Africans to the land of their imprisonment. Racial violence in the U.S. during the 1960s had filled him with despair, prompting him to move to Ghana to nurture the joy he could still detect deep in his heart. Living in Africa was a soul-saving affirmation of self and creativity for Feelings, but it also forced him to confront the brutal reality of the slave trade. It took Feelings 20 years to complete this wrenching but forthright and, ultimately, cathartic work of art, testimony not only to our capacity for evil, but also to the triumph of the spirit and of beauty.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780803718043
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
  • Publication date: 11/28/1995
  • Pages: 80
  • Sales rank: 775,383
  • Age range: 12 - 15 Years
  • Product dimensions: 10.54 (w) x 13.80 (h) x 0.61 (d)

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