Sometimes she must imagine their fate.īut Hall is not writing some careless fable. Hall alternates the facts of her search with a carefully imagined narrative of Black women who did all they could to disrupt systems of enslavement. She burrows into archives half a world away, in London and Liverpool, through obscure histories of colonial governments, in search not only of what was written but those things alluded to and sometimes obscured by the historical record. This reality sent her back to school to earn her PhD in history, focusing on race and gender in America.Ī page from Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts Photograph: Hugo MartínezĪt the very start, she wonders where she might find those foremothers who have resisted, and it’s this question that keeps her traveling, away from her wife and son. As a tenants’ rights lawyer, she was immersed in the consistent injustices rooted in racism, encoded in everything she touched. Walking the streets of New York City, she describes what it is like to live in the wake of slavery – which is, in fact, all around us. When all is said and done, Hall has tracked the evidence of crimes against humanity.įirst and foremost, she confesses she is haunted: “Sometimes when you think you’re hunting down the past … The past is hunting you. The resulting story is part autobiography, part Forensic Files. Hall, a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, combines a narrative of her own family life and ancestors with the sometimes-maddening search for enslaved women who died rather than be kept captive. They are an excellent accompaniment to Hall’s stories within the story. Slave ships power through waves that look like both water and flames. His artwork is reminiscent of woodblock, with all the energy of a superhero comic.

The book’s unmistakable and unapologetic power is amplified by Martínez, a New Orleans-based graphic artist and illustrator. Hall has offered up this ancestral pain and used it as a lens through which we might attend to those previously rendered invisible. It highlights the deep, unhealed, intergenerational pain of rape, torture and death that was the lot of untold women. Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s graphic book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, embraces a more significant, more authentic history of resistance. They ran, and they often died rather than be kept captive. Written by Vincent Harding, a historian, activist and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr, the book helped shatter the myth of the docile, happy slave described by slaveowners, including Thomas Jefferson (in quotes you’ll never find in Hamilton).Įnslaved Black people did resist. One of the first books to break through this fiction was the 1981 book There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America.

Wake the hidden history