A Coretta Scott King Honor Book
A Boston Globe–Horn Book Poetry Award Winner

An “imaginative and moving” (The Horn Book, starred review) portrait of a Black family tree shaped by enslavement and freedom, rendered in searing poems by ALSC Children’s Literature Legacy Award winner Carole Boston Weatherford and stunning art by her son Jeffery Boston Weatherford.

I call their names:
Abram Alice Amey Arianna Antiqua
I call their names:
Isaac Jake James Jenny Jim
Every last one, property of the Lloyds,
the state’s preeminent enslavers.
Every last one, with a mind of their own
and a story that ain’t yet been told.
Till now.

Carole and Jeffery Boston Weatherford’s ancestors are among the founders of Maryland. Their family history there extends more than three hundred years, but as with the genealogical searches of many African Americans with roots in slavery, their family tree can only be traced back five generations before going dark. And so from scraps of history, Carole and Jeffery have conjured the voices of their kin, creating an often painful but ultimately empowering story of who their people were in a breathtaking book that is at once deeply personal yet all too universal.

Carole’s poems capture voices ranging from her ancestors to Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman to the plantation house and land itself that connects them all, and Jeffery’s evocative illustrations help carry the story from the first mention of a forebear listed as property in a 1781 ledger to he and his mother’s homegoing trip to Africa in 2016. Shaped by loss, erasure, and ultimate reclamation, this is the story of not only Carole and Jeffery’s family, but of countless other Black families in America. - (Findaway World Llc)

Booklist Reviews

The prolific, award-winning Weatherford reclaims her family history (which also belongs to her son, Jeffery Boston Weatherford, whose haunting illustrations grace the print in black-and-white scratchboard) in this polyphonic aural feast. Written in rhythmic verses—both lulling and scathing—Weatherford's poetry seems meant to be read aloud. With resonance, even a sense of awe, narrators Edwards and Nixon take turns enlivening Weatherford's search for kin: "I could not pinpoint my ancestral origins./ … I did not know what I might never know./ But I knew the truth would be hard to come by." She traces enslaved generations at the Wye House on Maryland's Eastern Shore: bought, sold, silenced. Augmenting their voices, she also reveals unlikely spectators to the horrors of enslavement: the Chesapeake Bay into which "the Experiment brought captive Africans—/ a fount of forced labor in perpetuity"; the French Ormolu Clock, whose price tag was higher/ than that for an enslaved adult"; a plantation retriever, "Catching Black people is not my idea of sport." Edwards and Nixon solemnly bear witness, pay tribute, and honor the ancestors' stories. Grades 5-8. Copyright 2023 Booklist Reviews.