Brave Music of a Distant Drum
Ama was captured and bound into slavery as a young woman. Here she recounts her life to her adult son, Zacharias, who was raised from the age of ten in the family of his white owners. After being sold as a slave, Ama become the mistress of the aging Dutch governor of a plantation in the Caribbean. For a while her life was one of relative ease—something for which she later felt shame. But that one period was respite in a life marked by brutality and her own fierce determination to survive. Zacharias, a devout Christian, barely remembers life with his mother, so he is initially put off by her pagan practices and grim account of her past. At times her story is almost too painful to hear, and Zacharias is resistant to believing bad things about the white family who raised him, and who have promised his eventual freedom. But Ama insists he listen, knowing his future is dependent on understanding the past. This intense, painful narrative, adapted from the author’s adult book, Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (EReads, 2000), may be of particular interest for upper-level high school classrooms. ©2012 Cooperative Children's Book Center
CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 16 and older
Age Range:
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Format:
Novel
Subjects:
18th Century
19th Century
African Peoples
Colonialism
Historical Fiction
Memory
Mothers
Slavery
Survival
World History
Diversity subject:
Black/African
Publisher:
Red Deer
Publish Year: 2012
Pages: 175
ISBN: 9780889954700
CCBC Location: Fiction, Herbstein