★★★★☆ A culture of extraordinary resistance

Freewater

Amina Luqman-Dawson

As it happens, I read Freewater not long after reading Octavia E. Butler's classic Kindred. Although they are very different books, comparisons are irresistible. Both depict the lives of slaves on an antebellum southern plantation. Kindred is not a fun book. The characters repeatedly experience dehumanizing brutality and degradation. Amina Luqman-Dawson's Freewater, in contrast, *IS* a fun book, and yes, I enjoyed it. Of course, Freewater is targeted (and well targeted, in my opinion) at middle-grade children. How does Luqman-Dawson write a book about the experience of slavery that a ten-year-old kid can have fun reading?

You would guess that she softens the depiction. You would be right, but only a little. For instance, a certain racial epithet that appears 56 times in Kindred is absent from Freewater. And certain horrors of the treatment of slaves that are not suitable for young kids remain unmentioned. However, Luqman-Dawson's depiction of slavery is not gentle. Violence and degradation are there on the page.

Her main strategy, though, is to show slaves and their children resisting. She uses the true story of the maroons for this purpose. In "A Note from Amina" she describes

...those who found refuge deep in the swamps and forests of the American South and even began secret communities. Research and historical literature refer to these secret communities as “maroon communities” and the people who resided in them as “maroons.”

Her fictional swamp town of Freewater is such a community. Some characters of the novel are members of the Freewater community and some are residents of a nearby plantation. The story is told from the points of view of many of these characters. The chapters told by Homer, a twelve-year-old runaway slave boy, are in the first person, thus making him the central character.

"A Note from Amina" ends with these words,

This history is a reminder that wherever African enslavement existed in the Americas, a culture (and even communities) of extraordinary resistance was always present.

This focus on fighting back works! Bizarre though it sounds, Freewater is a fun story about slavery suitable for kids.

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