KIN

The lineage of a Black family comes to life through powerful poems.

Embarking on genealogical research can be daunting but thrilling. But that is not always the case for many Black families, their heritage interrupted by the enslavement of their ancestors and marred by the atrocities they endured. Carole Boston Weatherford invites readers to explore the past through her own family’s history. Beginning with her adolescent indifference and, later, her determined curiosity, she lays the groundwork for how the Lloyd family’s Wye House, in Maryland, came to be the site of mass cruelty. While the Lloyds passed down property, positions, and people as they amassed wealth, the enslaved began losing parts of their legacies. Writing chronologically, the author pieces together the history of enslavement, her strength and resolve palpable as she tells of her family’s triumphs despite the conditions they were forced to bear. Raw, stark, digitally rendered scratchboard illustrations multiply the depth of her profound words. The imagined thoughts of Weatherford’s kin and the personification of the things—among them Wye House and the Chesapeake Bay—that “witnessed” generations of enslavement will give readers a new perspective and inspire questions similar to those she intersperses throughout.

A striking work that reshapes the narrative around enslavement.