Today I read aloud Amistad Rising by Veronica Chambers with illustrations by Paul Lee and talked with you about this famous event. Now we are going to look at the Amistad story again through the eyes of one of its participants — Sarah Margru Kinson. The Amistad captives were mostly Mende, people who live in a part of Africa that is now in the country of Sierra Leone where I lived many years ago as a teacher for the Peace Corps.
Through Sarah Margru’s story, a story I’ve slightly fictionalized and told here (I will give you the username and password in class to access it), I hope you will have a deeper sense of forced immigration. I also think you will learn something about the tricky experience of writing about a real event. Should I fictionalize it or should I make it true? The version you will read is one I did for one publisher, but now another one wants it, but in a dfferent form. And so I am currently revising the story as nonfiction. It is for Dianne Hess, the Scholastic editor who was here a few weeks ago. So not only will you be learning about Margru and the Amistad story, but something about what it is to write, rewrite, write, and rewrite again!
As you read Margru’s story, I want you to write notes and responses in the chapbook I will give you. Consider the following for your notes:
Literary Stuff Here you can jot down any words or that seem descriptive, poetic, or otherwise give a literary sense.
Historical Stuff
Here you can jot down words, phrases, and titles of images that are clearly from history. (Be sure to include the images as most are primary sources and you may want to use them later in your blog posts and project.)Response
Here you need to write how the part you read made you feel, questions you may have, or anything else you want.
When you are done reading with all this you will be writing a blog post and also doing a poetry project (using Elizabeth Alexander’s poems) related to Margru’s story and the Amistad.