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Ebook50 pages13 minutes
Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this ebook
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.
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.
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Author
Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson is the author of Carver: A Life in Poems and Fields of Praise. She has won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, a Newbery Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor. Marilyn lives in Storrs, Connecticut, where she is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
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Reviews for Fortune's Bones
Rating: 4.423076961538461 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
26 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Powerful and spare poems written around the story of Fortune, a doctor's slave, who was rendered after his death into a skeleton used by the family and students for anatomy study.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I really enjoyed this book. I love poetry so I was interested to see what this book was like. I do think the combination of facts about fortune and the poems really work well together. I think this is a great book for middle school and higher because of the content and vocabulary.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book is a collection of poems with notes and archival photos written to commemorate the life, death, and post-death of a Connecticut slave from the late 1700s. The bones of Fortune, the slave, were preserved by his master and eventually made their way to the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut.A compelling presentation, and might be of interest to reluctant readers, since it’s only 31 pages with lots of pictures. However, there are a lot of complex issues raised about slavery, the fate of the bones, and of the museum exhibit. This would be useful as part of a unit on slavery, and a way to get people thinking about the difference between “slavery” the concept, and the lives and identities of individuals.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5(4Q, 3P) A very short book with an interesting idea: collected poems relating to a man named Fortune, a slave in the 1700s, whose bones were kept after death and put on display, with the identity of their original owner lost for a long time. Few details of his life are known, and to their credit the poems turn this to their advantage; rather than creating a fictional persona and labeling it Fortune, he's cast as an everyperson who could have been anybody. The Preface asks "Was Fortune bitter? Was he good or bad? Did he sometimes throw back his head and laugh?" This book raises some interesting areas of though--how, if at all, will we be remembered? What fundamental facts about a life can we deduce from a skeleton? What's the morality of displaying human remains in this way; is putting his bones up in a museum less respectful than using them as artistic inspiration? The poems are concrete rather than abstract, and easy to follow, and the history is interesting--that, combined with the brevity of the book, make me think that it could be good for reluctant readers who are hesitant about poetry. (Alternately, it could be a good starter way to make history less dry for someone who enjoys poetry.)