Copper Sun (review)

More than content in her small Ewe village in northwest Africa, Amari is daughter of the village storyteller, betrothed to a skilled musician and well loved by all. Therefore, she is welcoming when some Ashanti men arrive with pale-skinned visitors. The exuberant and generous feasting turns to disaster when the visitors kill the elderly and the very young, round up the rest of her people, chain them together, and force-march them to the coast. Draper tells the horrific story of the Ghanaian slave trade in minute detail through Amari's experience as she is taken to the Carolinas, where she is purchased and bestowed as a gift on a sixteen-year-old boy, to serve him domestically and sexually. The plantation owner also buys the indenture of a white girl named Polly that day, and the two become unlikely friends as they endure their servitude at the hands of a harsh master. A tragic event—the master's young wife gives birth to a baby that is obviously black, and the master kills both the baby and the slave responsible—triggers the sale of Polly, Amari, and Tidbit, a little boy whose mother tried to hide the baby, but the doctor entrusted with the transaction lets them escape. They decide to travel south in search of Fort Mose, a sanctuary for blacks that they aren't even sure exists. Draper tells the story of Amari and Polly in chapters that focalize the action through their alternating perspectives, covering a lot of historical ground while keeping the plot moving at a suspenseful clip. Though she romanticizes African village life somewhat, she does a good job of subtly implicating the sources of stereotyping and dismantling common assumptions about the period and the people. She doesn't sugarcoat the horror, but she is not gratuitous in describing scenes of rape and torture, making this a useful text for curricular applications, and one that students will actually read and want to discuss. Extensive print and web resources are included in an informative afterword.