Book Report: Wake

36. Rebecca Hall, with illustrations by Hugo Martínez, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021) (7/5/21)

Rebecca Hall, from New York City, educated at UC Berkeley, was a tenant's rights attorney for eight years before she decided to go back to school and get a PhD in history, specializing in race and gender. As she put it, "I could 'win' . . . cases for my clients. But I felt the need to see underneath the 'justice system'—to get at the root of what was warping the world." To do this, she "felt compelled to uncover the stories of other Black women who fought for justice. Those women warriors who fought their enslavement."

Hall did receive that PhD, and in an effort to bring her research—and the stories she uncovered, fragmentary though they might be—alive for others, she co-created this graphic (as in illustrated) history/memoir: history of a handful of slave revolts that she found records of, and memoir of her own background and her travails as a historian. It is quite the achievement.

Her research took her to New York City, London, and Liverpool. She dug through sheaves and sheaves of unindexed eighteenth-century British documents, trying to put together what pieces she could find. In the end, she uncovered a very few slave revolts that seemed to feature women—a paucity that she attributes in part to the patriarchal society, the fact that women, never mind slave women, would never have been considered (by British officials) as agents of their own fate, and so were not recorded as actors in slave revolts. Yet there clearly was female agency. Was it coincidence that more slave revolts occurred on ships that had a higher number of woman passagers? For women, as it turns out, were left unshackled on upper decks (the better to rape them)—with ready access to weapons . . .

In the account of one land-based slave revolt, four women are mentioned by name: Sarah and Abigail are found guilty and sentenced to death; Lily and Amba are found not guilty. A pregnant woman given a reprieve on hanging is mentioned—was it Sarah or Abigail? With such scanty evidence, Hall is compelled to imagine the particulars, the whys and hows, and the aftermath. These, and other, imaginings are presented in the black-and-white illustrations by Martínez.

Hall also looks back to the experience of her grandmother Harriet, born a slave in 1860 and subsequently the victim of Jim Crow.

And she outlines her own experience as a researcher, a historian seeking the truth. She is very much a player in this history. And the slave women who came before her are players in her own life, her own making-sense-of-it-all.

Here are some of the graphics from this book. I learned a lot from the words, but also from the drawings.