📚 Books listed on the website are not necessarily in stock and may need to be ordered 📚 (1/2)

Website orders and inquiries are processed from Monday to Friday (2/2)

Book background
Book cover of Fortune's Bones

Fortune's Bones

The Manumission Requiem

Marilyn Nelson

23
Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award

For young readers comes a poetic commemoration of the life of an 18th-century slave, from a past poet laureate and three-time National Book Award finalist

For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones.

Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Binding: Hardback
Publication date: 01 Nov 2004
Dimensions: 248 x 162 x 11 mm
ISBN: 9781932425123