Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels [Paperback]

Now in paperback, a haunting chorus of voices that tells the story of the captivity, education, language, hopes, dreams, and fight for freedom, of the African Americans abducted in theAmistadrebellion.

Based on the 1840 mutiny on board the slave shipAmistad, Ardencybegins with Buzzard, a sequence of poems told in the voice of the interpreter for the captive rebels, who were jailed in New Haven. In Correspondence, we encounter the remarkable letters to John Quincy Adams and others that the captives wrote from jail. The book culminates in Witness, a libretto chanted by Cinque, the rebel leader, who yearns for his family and freedom while eloquently evoking the Amistads' conversion and life in America. As Young conjures this array of characters, interweaving the liberation cry of Negro spirituals and the indoctrinating wordplay of American primers, he delivers his signature songlike immediacy at the service of an epic built on the ironies, violence, and virtues of American history.KEVIN YOUNG is the author of six previous collections of poetry and the editor of Library of America'sJohn Berryman: Selected Poems,the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets anthologiesBlue PoemsandJazz Poems,andGiant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. His bookJelly Rollwas a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize, andFor the Confederate Deadhe won the 2007 Quill Award for poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is currently the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.Chapter 1

Book-Keeping

Lomboko, Sierra Leone

1. Expenses Out.

Cost of Tecora, a 90-ton schooner $ 3,700 00

Fitting out, sails, carpenter and cooper's bill 2,500 00

Provisions for crew and slaves 1,115 00

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