Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem

by Marilyn Nelson

Overview

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award

For young readers comes a poetic commemoration of the life of an 18th-century slave, from a past poet laureate and three-time National Book Award finalist

For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones.

Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629795881
Publisher:	Astra Publishing House
Publication date:	08/01/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	999,335
Lexile:	NP (what's this?)
File size:	7 MB
Age Range:	6 - 9 Years

About the Author

Marilyn Nelson is the author of The Freedom Business, Fortune’s Bones, and Carver: A Life in Poems, among other titles. She is a National Book Award finalist, a Newbery Honor Book winner, and a Boston Globe-Horn Book award winner. She lives in East Haddam, Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 6 Up-This requiem honors a slave who died in Connecticut in 1798. His owner, a doctor, dissected his body, boiling down his bones to preserve them for anatomy studies. The skeleton was lost and rediscovered, then hung in a local museum until 1970, when it was removed from display. The museum began a project in the 1990s that uncovered the skeleton's provenance, created a new exhibit, and led to the commissioning of these six poems. The selections, which incorporate elements of a traditional requiem as well a New Orleans jazz funeral, arc from grief to triumph. A preface lays out the facts of Fortune's life, followed by "Dinah's Lament," in which his wife mourns the husband whose bones she is ordered to dust. Other pieces are in the voices of Fortune's owner, his descendants, workers, and museum visitors. The penultimate "Not My Bones," sung by Fortune, states, "What's essential about you/is what can't be owned." Each page of verse faces a green page containing text and full-color archival graphics that lay out the facts of Fortune's story. This volume sets history and poetry side by side and, combined with the author's personal note on inspirations, creates a unique amalgam that can be confusing at first. Subsequently, however, the facts inform the verse and open up a full appreciation of its rich imagery and rhythmic, lyrical language. The book brings the past to life and could make for a terrific choral reading.-Nancy Palmer, The Little School, Bellevue, WA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

In 1798, Fortune, a slave owned by Dr. Preserved Porter, a bonesetter, died; rather than bury him, Dr. Porter rendered his corpse and preserved his bones for anatomical study. Nelson remembers and celebrates Fortune in this slim funeral mass, moving from grief to joy, envisioning Fortune's moment of death as his deliverance from slavery to the ultimate freedom. As in Carver (2001), the poems of the cycle have multiple voices, from the doctor who owned the body but not the man within it, to Fortune himself and the enslaved wife who is forced to clean her husband's bones. The central question-where does humanity reside?-receives thoughtful, fervent consideration: it's a glorious reclamation of a man whose identity had been assailed from the moment of his birth to beyond his death. The poems are printed on the recto; facing them is an ongoing prose narrative of Fortune's life and afterlife, punctuated by photos, illustrations, and archival materials. While at times these can distract, they cannot dim the incandescence of the poetry, or the keen-eyed glimpse into one small moment in the American "Peculiar Institution" it provides. (bibliography) (Poetry. 12+)

Kirkus Reviews