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WOW2: May 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists, 5-9 through 5-16 [1]
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Date: 2023-05-13
May 15, 2021 – Historian Rebecca Hall was interviewed about her new graphic memoir, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, scheduled for release June 1, 2021. As a child, she was fascinated by her father’s stories about her grandmother Harriet Thorpe, born into slavery just before the Civil War. Hall grew up to be a tenants’ rights lawyer, but became disillusioned with the racism and sexism she saw everywhere in the justice system. She went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in history in 2004, and focused on the study of chattel slavery. More than anything, Hall wanted to learn about female resistance to slavery – because so little was ever taught about it at school. “If you’re a black child, you learn about slavery but you don’t learn about slave resistance or slave revolt in America,” Hall says. “But if you’re taught the history of resistance, that our people fought every step of the way, that is a recovery that is crucial to our pride in our humanity and our strength and struggle. So the issue of slave resistance is something I think everyone should know about.” Yet e very book about slave revolts said more or less the same thing, that men led the resistance while enslaved women took a back seat. She began a painstaking process of sifting through the captain’s logs of slave ships, old court records in London and New York, letters between colonial governors and the British monarchy, newspaper cuttings, even forensic examinations from the bones of enslaved women uncovered in Manhattan. Much of it made for difficult reading – human beings described time and time again in documents and insurance books as “cargo” with footnotes describing “woman slave number one and woman slave number two.” “Seeing them writing about my people as objects – It was horrific,” she says. Lloyd’s of London, she found, “were insuring against the insurrection of cargo – I think that completely sums it up. How can cargo insurrect?” Hall discovered that out of the 35,000 slave ship voyages documented, there were revolts in a tenth of them. And when she analysed the difference between ships that had revolts and those that didn’t, she discovered there were more women on the ships with uprisings. There were procedures for running these ships, Hall explains – and right at the top was the instruction to keep everyone below deck and chained while you were on the coast of Africa. “But once you got into the Atlantic, you unchained the women and children and brought them on deck,” she says. That’s when Hall began to find stories of women accessing the weapons chests and finding ways to unchain the men below. “They used their mobility and access,” she says. She also found women, mostly unnamed, who were involved in slave revolts in America, including a pregnant woman whose execution for taking part in the 1712 slave revolt in New York was delayed until after she gave birth, because her baby was “someone’s property.” The book, Hall says, was intended as a passion project – if not to heal, at least to come to terms with the trauma of slavery in her own past. But after a small kickstarter project, Wake became the target of a bidding war among multiple publishers, with Simon & Schuster offering the highest ever advance for this type of illustrated novel.
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