Time's Memory

A boy sent by an African god to tend the spirits of the dead struggles to fulfill his duty from within the bonds of slavery in Time's Memory, by National Book Award finalist Julius Lester.

Amma is the creator god, the master of life and death, and he is worried. His people have always known how to take care of the spirits of the dead – the nyama – so that they don't become destructive forces among the living. But amid the chaos of the African slave trade and the brutality of American slavery...