53 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth YatesAmos Fortune, Free Man
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Africa 1725”
Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries & Analyses reference slavery and anti-Black racist sentiments that feature in the source text.
Set in 1725, Chapter 1 begins at nightfall in an African forest clearing where the At-mun-shi people, from a nearby village, have gathered. They dance, sing, and play drums and flutes to usher in the season of planting corn. Saala, an old wise man, leads on the wooden drum. When the music stops, the people turn to face their chief and his two children—15-year-old prince At-mun and 12-year-old princess Ath-mun. Prince At-mun is tall and well-built; Princess Ath-mun is shy and has a leg disability that she hides behind her father as she leans on him. The chief spreads his arms open to indicate that the people can carry on at ease. As more people join in the clearing, they are careful to leave all their weapons at the outskirts of town because it is a peaceful gathering. The people sing to the earth and sun and ask the moon and rain to aid their harvest. When the chief signals, the people again fall silent.
Prince At-mun descends from his place next to his father to go to the center of the clearing. He kisses the ground, demonstrating his commitment to his people as their future chief. Then he returns to dance with his sister in front of everyone. The people remark on how wonderful he is and are confident in him as a leader. An old wise woman tells the people in the crowd next to her that At-mun will lead not with his head but with his heart. Dancing with her brother, Princess Ath-mun feels safe as she always does with him. Afterward, the people return to their joint celebration, now with At-mun leading them in dance.
Meanwhile, invaders—African men led by three white men—surround the village: They have come to capture the At-mun-shi people to be enslaved. They fire their muskets into the air, and one man fires at the chief. The chief dies, making At-mun the new chief. The invaders attack the At-mun-shi people and capture as many as they can. The white men whip At-mun to separate him from his sister and chain him up. At dawn, the captives are chained together and taken away, leaving behind only young children and the elderly. At-mun passes his sister who is kneeling on the ground in fear. As he leaves, he reminds her that she must lead their people, and she accepts this responsibility.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Middle Passage”
The captives are forced to walk until noon when they stop at a river for water. Meanwhile, other enslaved Africans are forced to prepare canoes for them to all travel downstream later. The At-mun-shi people are frightened, tired, and hungry. They look to At-mun for guidance. At-mun determines that their captors are smart so they must wait before they try to escape. The At-mun-shi people are familiar with the concept of slavery, as “inter-tribal” wars in Africa frequently involved slavery. However, the At-mun-shi have always been free.
After the white men rest under shelter, they direct the African men to load people into the canoes. On the river, they pass different kinds of trees and foliage, a few people along the shore, and various animals. These sights are all new to At-mun, who had never left his small village before. Though tired, hungry, and aching from the lashes to his back, At-mun is overwhelmed by a sense that the world is larger than he had imagined.
When night falls, At-mun prays to the Spirit of the Night, the Spirit of the River, and the Spirit of his father. At-mun knows he is strong enough to break free and command the At-mun-shi people in his canoe to overpower their captors. But when he prays, the “voice of the land” (20) responds that this is a time of birth and renewal, not of death. Because of this, At-mun decides to sleep instead.
Hours later, the canoes make it to the sea where a big ship waits. Instead of going directly to the ship, the people are led into deep pits covered up by a rough matting for shade where they stay for three weeks, with little food and drink. Over those weeks, new captives from other places are thrown into the pits as well. Over time, the At-mun-shi people become so worn down that they hardly recognize the authority of their chief. Meanwhile, small boats have also been ferrying between land and the ship—the White Falcon—loading it with provisions. The ship is from Boston. After the three weeks, the master of the ship comes ashore to trade his goods for people to be enslaved. He inspects the people being sold, choosing only those he considers to be the best and healthiest looking. Three hundred and forty-five enslaved people are then loaded onto his ship, where they must lie down tightly bound together. Then, they begin the journey along the Middle Passage, which lasts two months. During the journey, the captured people are fed poorly, whipped often, and only allowed on the deck once a day for an hour. The At-mun-shi people slowly begin forgetting their old lives, but At-mun tries to hold onto the memory that he was a king.
The White Falcon stops first in the Carolinas, where some people are sold. The ship makes periodic stops as it continues up the eastern coast until it reaches Boston in July of 1725. By then, there are only 20 enslaved people left on board. The strongest remain, including At-mun, who emerges from the ship to find he is the only At-mun-shi left. The enslaved people are taken to the auction block where white people judge and observe them. As At-mun is being examined, it is assumed that he cannot speak much, since he is always silent. Someone asks At-mun his name in English and he understands the question from the look in their eyes. When At-mun says his name again, the auctioneer remarks that they should call him “Amos.” A white, Quaker man named Caleb Copeland purchases At-mun, and they leave the wharf together.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
As a biographical novel, Amos Fortune, Free Man holds a peculiar position at the intersection of non-fiction and fiction, and the first few chapters already demonstrate some tension between these two aspects of the book. In writing Fortune’s story, Yates has positioned herself in the role of biographer, and it is the biographer’s responsibility to craft historical details into a cohesive and accurate narrative. Because Fortune is a real figure from history, there is an implicit assumption in the novel that it is an accurate reflection of his life. However, according to Professor Sara Schwebel, “[n]o records of the historical Fortune exist prior to his membership in a Massachusetts household” (Schwebel, Sara L. “Amos Fortune, Free Man: New Uses for a Children's Classic.” Commonplace, 16 Mar. 2020). This means that Chapters 1 and 2 rely heavily on Yates’s imagination of what Fortune’s life in Africa and his experience on the Middle Passage were like. For instance, Chapter 1 describes rituals in the At-mun-shi community, such as dancing to usher in the corn planting season, or certain hand gestures done by the chief to signal the people to be silent. However, with no records of Fortune’s childhood, such details are more likely fabrication than they are historical.
Such imaginative gap filling is further exacerbated by the fact that the book was written over two centuries after the protagonist’s birth and by an author from a vastly different subject position than Fortune. Indeed, while Fortune (c. 1710-1801) was an 18th-century formerly enslaved African man, Yates (1905-2001) was a 20th-century middle-class white woman from New York. Given what can be assumed to be a great ideological, experiential, and personal gap between Yates and her subject, it follows that Yates sometimes interprets the facts of Fortune’s life to support themes and explanations that are more aligned with her values than Fortune’s own. For example, Yates is careful to characterize At-mun/Amos Fortune and the At-mun-shi people as peaceful. They are introduced to the reader as gathering to dance, sing, and play music. Yates writes, “they were peaceable, and they were, as well, intense in their love of freedom” (5). This detail returns in Chapter 2 when Fortune and his people are captured and traveling down the river in chains inside canoes. Fortune prays for guidance on how to act but the response he receives is as follows: “This was the time of birth, the time of renewing. The At-mun-shi were a peaceful people…” (19). Though Fortune knows he and his people could overpower their captors and escape—“At-mun knew his strength” (19)—the narrative indicates that his peacefulness and his obedience to higher powers led Fortune to choose to remain in chains. This is another imagined incident by Yates, as there are no records of Fortune choosing to remain enslaved. Her choice to describe Fortune and his people as peaceful serves Yates’s characterization of Fortune as a “good” and likable Black man who will garner the sympathy of her white 1950s readership. This “good” Black man figure is not unlike the docile enslaved person trope in a character like Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This depiction is in direct contradiction with the At-mun-shi as “intense in their love of freedom” (5), making it ironic that Fortune would not contest his captivity even with a prime opportunity.
Yates’s task as a novelist conflicts with her task as a biographer meant to represent Fortune’s perspective. She employs novelistic literary devices and poetic language to craft a narrative that emphasizes the beauty of America while ignoring the emotional reality of Fortune’s enslavement. For example, in Chapter 2, Yates describes the beauty of nature along a riverbank: “Blossoms of brilliant hue were twice beautiful as they found their reflections in the water. […] Reds, yellows, greens were still pale with spring, but under the sun’s powerful rays they would soon intensify to the fullness of summer’s coloring” (17-18). The prose here is well crafted and makes use of personification (“the land cried out”), alliteration (“blossoms of brilliant hue”), and vivid imagery (“[r]eds, yellows, greens”). Such language is to be expected in a novel. However, while her narration revels in the richness of the landscape, the recently captured Fortune is chained to his neighbors, riding in a canoe after having seen his home destroyed. The irony in the text is profound, and likely unintentional, demonstrating how Yates’s role as novelist is sometimes misaligned with her role as faithful biographer.
This tension is further exacerbated by the fact that Amos Fortune, Free Man is a children’s novel, meaning it must do what children’s books do—simplify the story and emphasize the lessons and morals it contains. As Yates balances her responsibilities as a biographer, a novelist, and a writer considering a young audience, the result is complicated at best. The text is at odds with itself: in some ways, it does the important, intended work of representing and popularizing the life story of an admirable Black historical figure; in other ways, it undermines the integrity of that representation by coloring it with the author’s own motivations and the audience’s expectations, effectively overwriting Fortune’s lived experience with an imagined one that aligns with what a white person from the era would imagine is “good” in Blackness.
