Copper Sun
Copper Sun
Paperback
Summary
When pale strangers enter fifteen-year-old Amari's village, her entire tribe welcomes them; for in her remote part of Africa, visitors are always a cause for celebration. But these strangers are not here to celebrate. They are here to capture the strongest, healthiest villagers and to murder the rest. They are slave traders. And in the time it takes a gun to fire, Amari's life as she knows it is destroyed, along with her family and village.
Beaten, branded, and dragged onto a slave ship, Amari is forced to witness horrors worse than any nightmare and endure humiliations she had never thought possible--including being sold to a plantation owner in the Carolinas who gives her to his sixteen-year-old son, Clay, as his birthday present.
Now, survival and escape are all Amari dreams about. As she struggles to hold on to her memories in the face of backbreaking plantation work and daily degradation at the hands of Clay, she finds friendship in unexpected places. Polly, an outspoken indentured white girl, proves not to be as hateful as she'd first seemed upon Amari's arrival, and the plantation owner's wife, despite her trappings of luxury and demons of her own, is kind to Amari.
But these small comforts can't relieve Amari's feelings of hopelessness and despair. With strength and dignity, Amari first learns to survive, then yearns to escape to a most unlikely destination. When the opportunity to escape presents itself, Amari and Polly decide to work together to find the thing they both want most--freedom.
Decorated with vibrant characters--Teenie, the tiny slave woman who cooks much more than food, her son Tidbit and his dog Hushpuppy who become victims of vicious cruelty, the mysterious and kindly Mrs. Derby, and many others--the complicated inter-relationships of those who live together on the plantation are explored with sometimes shocking developments.
Grand and sweeping in scope, detailed and penetrating, Copper Sun's unflinching and unforgettable look at the African slave trade and slavery in America will have the impact on young readers that Alex Haley's Roots had on the previous generation.
Copper Sun has been named one of the 100 Best Books of All Time by TIME Magazine.
My Spirit Speaks: A Note From Sharon Draper
Copper Sun is unlike anything I've ever written. It is the book of my heart, the book of my spirit. I went to Ghana several years ago and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the land and people, as well as the history of the place that hovered just out of reach. When I visited the slave castles, where millions of Africans were housed like cattle before being shipped as cargo and sold as slaves, I felt their spirits crying out to me. When I crawled on my hands and knees through the "door of no return," which led from the darkness of the prison to the incomprehensible vastness of a beach, I knew I had to tell the story of just one of those who had passed that way.
The story of Amari is fictional, of course, but is based on the horrible reality of the slave trade. I have spent almost ten years doing research on this novel and editing it for accuracy of fact as well as sincerity of spirit. It is important to me that I represent her well. She has become a part of who I am. It is as if I am her voice speaking across the ages.
Since this is a big departure from my usual contemporary novels of teenagers, homework, and social problems, I want to make sure that young readers, who might think they don't want to read historical fiction, are drawn in from the beginning, so the novel is character-driven, with a fast-moving plot, shocking developments, and unforgettable characters. I want young readers to ask themselves, "What if that had been me? How would I have coped as a fifteen-year-old slave?
This book is dedicated to all the millions of girls like Amari who died during that process--as well as those who lived and suffered, but endured. I also dedicate this to all those who came before me--the untold multitudes of ancestors who needed a voice. I speak for them. Amari carries their spirit. She carries mine as well.
