Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford

Genre

This book is in the historical fiction genre.

Targeted Age Group

The age group for this book is ages 10 and up. It is cataloged as a teen book at my public library, and as it encompasses ages beyond 6th grade, I am using it for the 7th-12th grade category of this project.

Summary

This book follows the journey of the author as she learns about and traces her enslaved ancestors through difficult-to-find records. Over the course of the book, and as she learns about these people, she muses about their lives, their surroundings, and their relationships. 

Justification

This is a Coretta Scott King honor book, and fills the requirement for a teen historical fiction book. I was interested in learning about the author’s experience of exploring family history through enslaved ancestors, when records for finding and learning about these people are limited or difficult to access. I come from a religious background where family history is valued, and with an awareness of the difficulty that is searching old records, was interested in this author’s story. 

Evaluation

In this section, I will evaluate style and language, point of view, and illustrations.

As a prose novel, style and language is central to bringing these stories to life, and they are beautifully executed by Weatherford (2023). Personification is used to explore the perspectives of places like Wye House and Chesapeake Bay, or objects such as the mirrors in Wye House, to ask, even without an answer, what they witnessed. Regarding the people throughout the book, there is a clear difference between the voices of the white Wye family, and the Black people enslaved under them. While the Wye family discusses the dehumanizing trade, purchasing, inheritance, and ownership of those they enslaved, both enslaved and freed people such as Frederick Douglass, Daphne, Isaac Copper, and many others voice their resistance, knowledge, suffering, and hope through community. Even on pages that lack an illustration, Weatherford’s (2023) words create mental images of the history they invoke.

Because the format of this book is broken up into its individual poems, the points of view are able to easily shift between historical people, places, and the narrator. Weatherford (2023), in the author’s note, discusses the extensive research that went into this project, and how she “asked [her] ancestors to speak to, and through, [her]” (p. 197). The effort to express the individual voices of these ancestors is clearly felt, as each poem representing a different individual feels unique to their experiences, and like their own voice speaking through the text. By using the poems to shift perspectives throughout the book, each ancestor is given the space to speak their lives and names onto pages where they will be remembered beyond ledger records (Weatherford, pp. 24-26). 

Lastly, I want to discuss the illustrations in this book. Jeffrey Boston Weatherford’s (2023) stylized drawings are composed against either black or white paper, using hatched lines to construct the artwork. The rough, unblended texture of these illustrations may act as a reflection of the rough lives experienced by those who lived under enslavement. The unfinished rendering could also act to enhance the text, in that Weatherford’s (2023) experience of researching and learning about her family history was a difficult and perhaps unfinished process. A better understanding of these people exists because of that extensive research, but, as expressed in the final poem of the book, their lives exist “between the lines of the epitaph” that marks their resting place, and their names are “lost but for ledgers of the Lloyd’s property and possessions” (Weatherford, 2023, pp. 193, 195). Even as family names, relations, occupations, and more were uncovered through extensive research as shown in the bibliography, there are still many unanswered questions about who these ancestors were, but the hatched lines of the illustrations work to piece together this knowledge and form a more complete visual of their history. The linework creates an impression of who these people were and what they experienced, while still unable to fill in all the corners of their lives.

This book is a heartfelt and heartbreaking tribute to Weatherford’s (2023) ancestors. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about African American history, and about the hard work of tracing one’s family history. 

References

Weatherford, C. B. (2023). Kin: Rooted in hope (J. B. Weatherford, Illus.). Atheneum Books for Young Readers.