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Chapter 1: Africa 1725
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Amos Fortune, Free Man, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom and Slavery
Dignity and Racism
Hard Work and Good Character
Providence and Faith
Summary
Analysis
The captors force the At-mun-shi to walk through the jungle for hours until they reach a river. As they huddle on its bank, At-mun (Amos) makes eye contact with each of his people, reminding each of his responsibility, as their chief, to care for them. Although the At-mun-shi have always been a free people, At-mun recognizes slavery as a part of African tribal warfare. He decides to bide his time until he and his people can escape, but he worries at how quickly they are becoming “abashed and spiritless.”
The way the hunters treat the At-mun-shi people both demonstrates their belief in their captives’ essential inhumanity and—by its cruelty—systematically dehumanizes the captives. Presumably, all the At-mun-shi value their freedom as much as Amos (At-mun), but the book portrays only him as capable of retaining his pride in the face of mistreatment. At best, this argues for the ways in which he deserves a starring role; at worst, it could suggest that the At-mun-shi who become hopeless deserve their terrible fates.
Themes
The captors offer the At-mun-shi water. Then they retire to shaded shelter, leaving their captives to suffer the intense midday heat. Late in the afternoon, they load the captives into canoes. Most of the At-mun-shi cower in the boats, but At-mun (Amos) looks around as they float downstream, watching villages pass by. Farther downriver sit larger, more established villages with stone buildings and large, tilled fields. Despite hunger and weariness, he realizes with increasing wonder that the world extends far beyond the small territory of jungle he has known.
As the terrible march toward the Atlantic crossing continues, the At-mun-shi lose more of their dignity at the hands of their inhuman captors. All except Amos (At-mun) who continues to view the world with curiosity and interest, insisting on his human dignity. His realization that the world is much bigger than he thought points towards arguments long made to support the practice of enslavement on the grounds that it teaches its victims to be civilized.
Themes
The canoes float through the night while captives and guards sleep fitfully. Awake and alert, At-mun (Amos) looks up to the stars and prays to the Spirits of the Night, the River, and his father. He knows he could easily overpower the white men in his boat, and he trusts that his people would join his uprising in an instant. But when he prays to the Spirit of Life, he receives an answer that spring represents renewal, not death. At-mun rests his head on his knees and sleeps.
Even before he arrives in the North American colonies and learns to practice Christianity, the book portrays Amos (At-mun) as a faithful human being who trusts in higher powers to direct his actions. His prayerfulness in the boat foreshadows later episodes in which he asks God to give him signs pointing toward the right path. And, since the book argues that Amos’s conversion to Christianity justifies his enslavement, the moment where his higher power directs him to not escape keeps him on that path.
Themes
Early the next morning, the company reaches the ocean. A large boat rests at anchor on the waves. The captors force the At-mun-shi into deep ditches, then toss in coconuts, bread, and skins of water. This sparks fighting among the desperately hungry and thirsty people. Rough mats cover the pits, protecting captives from the sun but not the rain. Over subsequent days, captives from other tribes—some allies, some enemies, some strangers—join the At-mun-shi in the pits. But the law of survival replaces both friendship and enmity with animal instinct. Everyone fights over scarce food and water. At-mun (Amos) tries to maintain the bonds among the At-mun-shi near him, but as the days pass, their humanity slips further and further away until they look at him with no recognition.
The At-mun-shi’s captors treat the people worse than they would animals in an effort to break their spirits and prepare them for enslavement. Amos (At-mun) clings to his own personal dignity to protect him from the spiritual effects of this terrible treatment and succeeds in remembering not just his identity as At-mun but also his identity as a human being with the right to freedom and liberty. But while he sets a good example for readers to emulate, his success in the face of everyone else’s failure also subtly suggests that the captives who lose their identities are at least as complicit in this loss as the hunters who abuse them.
Themes
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After several weeks, the crew of the White Falcon finish stuffing the ship with supplies. Its captain comes ashore to trade for captives, who are fed, washed, and arranged for his inspection. After weeks in the pits, their captors have broken their spirits; the white men have effectively degraded them until they become “merchandise” for exchange. Priding himself on his ability to judge “flesh,” the White Falcon’s captain wastes little time making his selections.
The book continues to dramatize the dehumanizing ways enslavers treated their victims and to argue that enslavers designed this treatment to deprive their victims of dignity and humanity. The amount of abuse necessary to break people’s spirits suggests enslavers’ cruelty and the importance of freedom to all people.
Themes
The ship’s crew ferry the 345 Black people who won the captain’s “approval” to the ship. There, the crew forces them into the narrow hold, where they will spend most of the voyage lying chained, side-by-side, barely able to move. At-mun (Amos) finds a gap in the hull through which he takes one last look at the land where he was born and grew up, and where he had stood for just a moment as the chief of his people. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he knows he will never see this land again.
Onboard the ship, the crew treats their passengers more like inanimate objects than the human beings they are. Amos refuses to be cowed. Even when his physical movements are narrowly confined, he still finds ways to exercise some autonomy, like sitting up to take one last look at the continent of Africa receding into the distance.
Themes
At-mun (Amos) calls to his people in their language, and although he knows that nearly two dozen lie in chains around him, no one answers. The rough treatment they have received from the slavers has made them forget not only that they are At-mun-shi, but even that they are human beings. Guttural, inhuman moans fill the hold. At-mun stays awake through the whole first night at sea, willing himself to remember his royal identity and his home.
As Amos (At-mun) leaves the African continent, the book portrays him as the only captive who has retained a sense of autonomy and dignity. The rest have become animals, incapable of human speech. Recognizing his failure to protect his people, Amos vows to protect himself from the dehumanizing treatment he receives from his captors.
Themes
The Middle Passage—the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean—takes two months. The captives remain in the hold the whole time except for the one hour a day during which the crew washes the hold with vinegar. Then, they mill about the deck while the crew washes them with cold seawater and feeds them their meager rations. At-mun (Amos) finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish his people from strangers, since they no longer answer his call. He struggles to remember his life before captivity as his world narrows down to the limits of basic survival. Still, he refuses to forget his royal birthright, his sister’s face, or his own name.
As the voyage grinds on, Amos begins to understand what happened to the rest of his people, since the dehumanizing treatment he receives makes it ever harder to bear himself in accordance with his dignity and retain his royal identity. His captors deny him—and everyone else in their hold—basic human rights like privacy and the right to move about freely.
Themes
The White Falcon luckily escapes disease outbreak on the voyage and of the 345 captives she took on in Africa more than 300 remain. Still, the voyage has taken a toll on the captives, and the captain sells off the weakest and most compromised first. The ship makes several stops as she sails up the coast until she reaches her home port of Boston in early July 1725.
Amos’s fictionalized experience of the Middle Passage—endured by 12.5 million people stolen from their homelands and forced into enslavement in real life—diverges from historical fact only in the unbelievably small number of people who die on the crossing.
Themes
Early on a Monday morning, the White Falcon unloads the last 20 captives at the Boston wharf. These are the strongest, most-able bodied, and when At-mun (Amos) looks at them, he realizes that he recognizes none. The rest of his people are gone. The captives move slowly and docilely down the gangplank, ever fearful of lashes from the crew members’ whips. The crowd gathered near the auction block laughs at how awkwardly At-mun moves in the strange western clothes he’s been given.
Amos (At-mun) makes it to Boston because he is strong and has weathered the crossing better than many other captives. His inherent dignity and ability to cling to his humanity despite ill treatment thus earns him an important reward in the form of bondage in the New England colonies, where he has a greater chance to earn his freedom than in the Americas’ plantation colonies.
Themes
At-mun (Amos) watches the gulls wheeling in the sky above the wharf while the auctioneer describes his strength, health, and prospects to potential buyers. The crew reports that At-mun never speaks. But the auctioneer can hardly consider this a defect, and he encourages his buyers to think of how nice it will be to be served by someone who can’t talk back.
In their ability to seemingly rise above the laws of gravity, birds represent freedom, so when Amos watches them overhead, the book metaphorically suggests how much he yearns for his freedom in this moment. And he refuses to compromise his sense of dignity by talking to his captors.
Themes
A man (later identified as Caleb Copeland) steps forward and asks At-mun (Amos) for his name. At-mun doesn’t understand the words, but the man’s kind tone catches his attention. And although he vowed not to answer white men, he finds himself saying “At-mun.” Caleb offers the auctioneer thirty pounds for At-mun. Surprised to get so much for a “truculent black,” the auctioneer readily agrees, warning Caleb to break At-mun’s spirit with plenty of hard work. And when At-mun repeats his name, the slaver suggests that Caleb call him “Amos.” With a gentle word, Caleb—who went to the wharf to sell cloth, not buy an enslaved boy—leads At-mun home.
The kindness in Caleb Copeland’s voice immediately sets himself apart from the rest of the white men Amos has met. The book implies that Caleb’s kindness sets him apart from violent enslavers, and while this may make Amos’s time in his house less painful, it doesn’t mitigate the fact that Caleb willingly enslaves Amos. Freedom and slavery are fundamentally incompatible, no matter how enlightened or kind an enslaver may be.
Themes
