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.
Themes
Earning Freedom Through Hard Work and Self-Reliance
Amos Fortune, Free Man emphasizes a value of hard work and self-reliance. By endowing Fortune with these qualities, Yates positions him as an idealized image of a Black man. This ideal is defined through the lens of white supremacy and ignores Black people’s humanity, rights, and moral character since it assumes that all their suffering is justified if it teaches them the value of hard work. This value structure has three main elements: Yates identifies poverty as the result of personal moral failing, perpetuates ideas that Black enslaved people are not all deserving of their freedom, and ignores the fact that not all people (Black or white) are equally equipped for upward mobility.
In condemning Lois’s character, Yates perpetuates the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy and do not work hard enough. This view ignores that poverty can result from complex socioeconomic, political, and personal factors. Indeed, the novel does not offer any further evidence of Lois being a unique case as someone who is particularly idle and neglectful of her responsibilities; the only evidence of her supposed “shiftlessness” is her poverty and Violet’s judgment of her. The idea that poverty is one’s own fault and one’s own responsibility has historically stereotyped and disadvantaged Black people and other people of color. This has fueled such damaging phenomena as the overcriminalization of African Americans through laws against vagrancy and loitering that disproportionately target poor or unemployed Black people and have their roots in the Jim Crow era.
The novel’s emphasis on hard work plays into racist beliefs that enslaved Black people were not inherently deserving of freedom or human dignity. Rather, it was only the most exceptional, hardworking, and “civilized” (as in, most acclimated white Western norms and values) who could earn or buy their freedom. Examples can be found in the stories of the most famous formerly enslaved Black figures like Frederick Douglass or Henry “Box” Brown, who worked hard, devised plans to achieve their freedom, and garnered respect because of their exceptionalism as literate and well-adapted to white norms. Fortune, too, serves as a prime example of this ideology. We see this in the relationship between Fortune and Richardson, who requires that the people he enslaves work hard to pay back their debt and prove themselves worthy of their eventual manumission. The book describes Richardson as “stern” but a “good man” (53) with “reasonable conditions,” (61); it characterizes him as simply having standards, never interrogating the fact that the human right to freedom ought to be unconditional.
Lastly, the novel’s reinforcement of the value of hard work further establishes the early United States as the setting. Fortune’s industriousness and diligence reflect the quintessentially American values of individualism, hard work, and “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps”—self-reliance. Yates uses this ideology to help illustrate the early American landscape that Fortune inhabits, especially in the wake of American independence from Britain, as well as in Yates’s own version of manifest destiny as Fortune journeys into the “wilderness” (95) to build his life anew. The late-18th-century American vision of self-reliance overlooked the issue of inequity as not all people had access to the same resources, tools, networks, and opportunities to be able to thrive. There were many social, legal, and political barriers that made it difficult for Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries (and even beyond) to obtain their freedom, have a family, own a business, own property, move to the town of their choosing, and live in safety, as Fortune does. As a children’s book, the novel is didactic, but the lessons it teaches do not necessarily conform to the reality of the American experience.
Slavery as a Benevolent Institution
Amos Fortune, Free Man offers a representation of enslavement as an opportunity for Black people to be supported and improved, which recreates popular attitudes from the time of the novel’s publication regarding the history of enslavement as a benevolent institution in America. Yates praises three supposed benefits of slavery: religious conversion, formal and civil education, and provision/protection.
In Chapter 1, Yates describes the At-mun-shi people as “pagan” but “peaceable” (5). The term “pagan” carries a negative connotation, and Yates’s use of the conjunction “but” indicates an assumed contrast between being “pagan” and being “peaceable,” further casting Africans as inferior and dangerous. Through his enslavement, Fortune converts to Christianity, which the narrative states “justif[ies] in large measure the expenditure Mr. Richardson had made” (56). In other words, Fortune’s conversion justifies his enslavement, and Yates implies that Richardson is making a sacrifice on Fortune’s behalf. Fortune himself affirms this when he reflects approvingly on his choice not to escape when he was first captured, as “it does a man no good to be free until he knows how to live, how to walk in step with God” (162).
Yates offers slavery not only as benevolent in its potential for evangelism but also for how it provided enslaved people with a civil and formal education. Yates describes Fortune’s hunger, pain, and weariness as he sits, recently captured, in the canoe. She then continues, “But more than all that he felt [...] a strange feeling that rose to meet the new world his eyes were absorbing. [...] He who had known nothing but the jungle now found wonder stirring in him that there was a world beyond” (18). At the very earliest stages of his enslavement, Yates emphasizes not Fortune’s despair but his excitement at being exposed to new things. This is further underscored when he adapts to Western customs. At the Copelands, at first he disregarded the fork and ate with his hands, but he eventually “relinquished his African ways and sat on a chair, slept on a bed, ate with a knife and fork instead of his fingers” (40). The final and most important aspect of Fortune’s education and civilizing program is literacy, which he learns from the Bible in Mrs. Copeland’s kitchen, where she holds a school program for children. Fortune’s placement with children here underscores Yates’s infantilization of him and that, to become fully human, he must start from scratch.
Finally, Yates identifies benevolence in slavery by describing it as a source of provision and protection for enslaved people. The novel frames Fortune’s first enslaver, Caleb Copeland, as a “protector to Amos” (46), i.e., a white savior. Yates describes “the black man,” in the general sense, as “look[ing] to the white man for wisdom and understanding” (77), which is a common trope in white savior narratives. Both Fortune and Violet express nostalgia for the time of their enslavement after they are free: In Chapter 7, “Amos thought longingly of the better equipment he had had in Woburn” (112); in Chapter 6, Violet longs for “[t]he comfort of a big house and the companionship of many servants and slaves” (95).
Yates’s romanticized picture of slavery excludes the many violences of enslavement, including but not limited to physical abuse, psychological suffering, personal disenfranchisement, and the destruction of familial and ancestral bonds.
The Importance of Patience for African Americans Desiring Freedom
A repeated theme throughout the novel is the importance of patience in a well-lived life, especially for the novel’s Black characters who desire freedom. Fortune is extraordinarily patient and advises that others do the same while waiting for their circumstances to change. This view reflects Yates’s view that Black people must wait for justice and that it is wrong to take violent or radical action in the name of freedom. In Yates’s day, her portrayal of Fortune was lauded for “its effectiveness in combatting prejudice” (“Nashua Writers Dinner to Feature Noted Author.” Nashua Telegraph, 2 Jun. 1976). Meanwhile, Fortune’s willingness to wait for his freedom stands in contrast to Black freedom movements that have historically been motivated by the need to take urgent action toward equality.
Part of Fortune’s model of patience is to repeatedly deny opportunities for freedom because he does not believe it is not the right time: “[W]henever Caleb spoke to him of manumission he said he did not want it yet” (43). Presumably, Fortune agrees with the white men who believe that a formerly enslaved person must be sufficiently cultivated to be worthy of freedom. With each of his wives—Lily, Lydia, and Violet—he has to wait years before he can marry them because he must first work to save up enough money to purchase their freedom. He must also wait to purchase his land: “By the end of 1789, when Amos Fortune was in his eightieth year, he became a land owner in his own right and one of his life’s long dreams was fulfilled” (145). While enslaved, Fortune advised his fellow Black men and women to “Wait for the free day [...] for it is coming” (44). This view reinforces the idea that freedom is inevitable but takes time and can only be impeded, rather than hastened, by Black activism. The reader knows that nearly another century would go by before the Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect in 1865, making “the free day” impossible for his fellows to see in their lifetimes.
Fortune is never angry that his freedom is delayed as when the Copelands break their promise and sell him to cover the late Caleb Copeland’s debts. Fortune even grins and jokes at the auction (51), recalling the Uncle Tom character trope of an enslaved Black man who is “happily submissive” and “non-threatening to whites” (“The Tom Caricature,” Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum). When Mr. Richardson forces Fortune to wait and prove himself before he can visit the wharf to check for his sister, “Amos flashed a knowing smile” (55). When he can find no lodging in Keene so he must wait in the stable until morning, Fortune is “pleased that the straw was clean and there was fresh water” (86). He even internalizes patience as an intrinsic part of the Black character when he says to Violet, “We blacks are used to waiting” (71). Part of Fortune’s “good” characterization as a Black man is that the white people around him never have to fear his retaliation.
African Americans had to endure centuries of enslavement, followed by many more years of systemic and institutionalized discrimination and injustice. The steps to freedom and equality for Black Americans and other people of color were never passive enterprises but required Black activism, allyship across racial lines, direct political action such as protests and insurrections and systemic changes to the legal system. Despite the possibility that some enslaved people could have, historically, believed in Fortune’s admonition to “wait for the free day,” according to historian Herbert Aptheker, there are “records of approximately two hundred and fifty revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery” (Gates, Henry Louis. “Did African-American Slaves Rebel?” PBS, 18 Sept 2013). Even the civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who is known for his peaceful approach to change, argued “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair” (“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1963). While the historical Amos Fortune did work diligently, build a successful business, acquire wealth, profess Christianity, and buy his own freedom and that of his wives and adopted daughter, Yates invents his attitude as a happily subservient, patient enslaved man who cautions others against striving for freedom too quickly.
