The 1619 Project: Born on the Water by Nikole Hannah-Jones (review)

A young Black girl is dismayed when her teacher asks her and her classmates to trace their roots and she can only count back a few generations. When she tells her grandmother how embarrassed she was during the assignment, the elderly woman begins to tell the history of their family, starting not, as many American-educated students might predict, in enslavement or the Middle Passage, but instead reaching back to their ancestors in the Kingdom of Ndongo in West Africa: “Their story does not begin/ with whips and chains./ They had a home, a place, a land/ a beginning./ Their story is our story.” From there she describes a joyful and rich culture in which people happily traded goods, carefully worked the land, tenderly raised children, and generally led fulfilling lives. Grandma’s narrative must move, inevitably and unfortunately, to white men’s arrival and their subsequent enslavement of the girl’s ancestors, the painful years of forced labor, the small and large victories of abolition and the Civil Rights movement, the accomplishments of prominent Black historical figures, and eventually the necessity and significance of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s an ambitious trajectory to lay out, but Hannah-Jones and Watson give each moment its due with melodic poems that convey mood with ease, from the joy of the girl’s ancestors’ dances (“Their bodies a song under open sky and bright sun./ Their bodies a swaying testament to the beauty of creation”) to their grief in the separation from their home (“The white people called this land Virginia,/ a sweet-sounding word/for a place of such pain”). Paired with Smith’s gorgeous, painterly art, the book allows readers to see not just the inhumanity of enslavement but also the terrible loss of a deeply connected community: as scenes of bustling markets and playing children are replaced with burned out village and abandoned toys, the sweeping brushstrokes of energy and movement are lost to darkness or confined to stricter lines. This would make an excellent pairing with Clarke’s When We Say Black Lives Matter (BCCB 10/21) to simultaneously acknowledge Black intergenerational trauma while celebrating resilience, and it might also be a needed reminder to educators that the perennial family roots assignment needs some adjusting.