This doesn’t sound like many until one considers that for centuries no one believed these captives were capable of revolt at all. Quantitative historians, who use statistical tools to study big-picture historical trends, created a vast database of research on over 36,000 slave ship voyages that took place over 400 years.”Īt least one in 10 voyages was disrupted by revolt.
She credits the banding together of a group of historians who have long searched the archives for the outlines of the transatlantic slave trade: “By the 1990s, some historians started using new digital technologies and began pooling their resources. 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. A 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. This reality sent her back to school to earn her PhD in history, focusing on race and gender in America. 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.
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