
The
Middle Passage, Tom Feelings
My
eyes touch, my fingers trace
The griot chants, clicks, songs of the
Ancestors
The warrior words stretched taut across
the soul
Drum words whispering the name of God
They say that beyond the blood-tide cries
there is triumph
They say that beyond the blues-moan
there is continuance
Triumph and continuance
A reaching back and a forward surge
A place where Black dreams swell
consciousness
Even as the Niger swells old seasons into
new life.
History
of My People
Walter Dean Myers.
Grade
Level 3-12
Art • Geography • History • Language Arts
As students strive to understand the impact of slavery on
American history and the American consciousness, they often
have only sketchy "neutral" textbook renditions
as a knowledge source. Slave narratives and diaries offer
alternative glimpses of history often omitted from the official
curriculum. Using the Internet, students can glimpse the
underlying emotions and motivations linked to the agony
and the terror of the Middle Passage and being owned by
another person.
Tom
Feelings took fifteen years to complete his work on the
book, Middle Passage. His illustrations, achingly
real, draw us into the lives of the millions of African
men, women, and children who were savagely torn from their
beautiful homelands, crowded into a disease-ridden "death
ship," and transported under nightmarish conditions
to the so-called New World. In his works such as Middle
Passage and Soul Looks Back in Wonder, Tom
Feelings gives a tribute to the survival of the human spirit,
and the humanity won by the survivors of the Middle Passage
The
Middle Passage
Middle
Passage and African American History Museum
Amistad
Links
The
Middle Passage-Tom Feelings
The
Middle Passage Lesson Plan
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