Sowing History,
Reaping Justice:
Writing Children’s Books about Slavery in Canada and the US North
A collection of Illustrated Children’s books about Slavery in Canada and the US North
A Forward from
Charmaine A. Nelson
The first children’s books were published in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Some three hundred years earlier, the New England Puritan John Cotton published Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1656). From those humble beginnings, children’s books now generate $3.4 billion USD a year (2023). Once established, children’s literature came to embrace two intertwined objectives, entertainment and education. But not all children’s books are about play and fun. Some have tackled difficult histories like Transatlantic Slavery.
A Forward from
Charmaine A. Nelson
The first children’s books were published in Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Some
three hundred years earlier, the New England Puritan John Cotton published Spiritual Milk for
Boston Babes (1656). From those humble beginnings, children’s books now generate $3.4 billion
USD a year (2023). Once established, children’s literature came to embrace two intertwined
objectives, entertainment and education. But not all children’s books are about play and fun.
Some have tackled difficult histories like Transatlantic Slavery. Published between 1836 and
1838 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, the abolitionist periodical The Slave’s Friend was
directed at young readers. Amongst its woodblock prints were depiction of shackles, beseeching
enslaved people, slave auctions, and white children teaching black enslaved children how to
read.
The challenge of creating children’s books about Transatlantic Slavery is how to
accurately represent a genocide to children without having the material traumatize the young
reader. Across the four hundred years of Transatlantic Slavery (1400s to 1800s), Britain,
Denmark, France, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands violently seized inhabited
indigenous lands across the Americas and expropriated some 12.5 million enslaved black
Africans. As the unfree labor for Europe’s imperial project, enslaved black people commonly
became the majority population in tropical or semi-tropical regions dominated by plantation
agriculture. But enslaved people were also sent further north to places like Canada and the US
North, where they became a minority outnumbered by white settlers and indigenous people.
There is no shortage of children’s literature that focuses on the former populations, narrating
stories of cotton, sugarcane, and coffee plantations. What is missing is academic and children’s
literature about the latter.
Scholarship on slavery in Canada and the US North lags far behind that of slave majority,
tropical regions in both quantity and scope. But this is not a problem of the archive. Enslavers
documented their property which, tragically, included human beings. The issue then, is that there are far fewer scholars trained in and dedicated to the study of slavery in these regions. The knock-on effect is that far fewer students are taught about the distinctiveness of slavery in these regions, and far fewer children’s book authors have emerged to take up the challenge of
representing the unique experiences of enslavement in northern and cold-climate regions.
This exhibition began in Prof. Charmaine A. Nelson’s 2025 UMass Amherst course, The
Visual Culture of Slavery, in which her students were tasked with creating an original illustrated children’s book that illuminates aspects of the lives and experiences of enslaved black people in Canada or the US North. All the assembled books, in some way, touch upon one or more of the following four themes: (1) The Journey from Africa, (2) Enslaved Biography, (3) Enslaved Children, and (4) Slave Resistance. Together, they have produced powerful educational tools which can be used to teach small children and adolescents about these complex and horrible
histories. At a time when various forces are conspiring to sanitize these histories or to ensure that they are not taught at all, this work is more important than ever!
Books
Themes
Slave Resistance
From the moment they were forced onto slave ships, enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery. Resistance was widespread and took many forms throughout the four hundred years of Transatlantic Slavery and the regions it shaped...
Slave Resistance
From the moment they were forced onto slave ships, enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery. Resistance was widespread and took many forms throughout the four hundred years of Transatlantic Slavery and the regions it shaped.
Opportunities for resistance depended on one’s identity and circumstances. Enslaved men in roles like drivers or artisans, often entrusted with more education and mobility, had more opportunities to escape. Meanwhile women, often confined to domestic or field labor, faced greater surveillance and had less opportunities to develop allies and friendships away from their enslavers’ lands and households. Complexion also played a critical role. As blackness became conflated with the status of “slave,” mixed-race enslaved people often escaped by impersonating free people and passing as another racial group (mainly white or indigenous). For enslaved children, the elderly, and the disabled, escape was rarely possible due to physical limitations and the risk of separation from family.
But what did resistance look like when permanent escape was not an option? For many, it meant preserving their identities by practicing their ancestral religions and cultures, rejecting names imposed by enslavers, remembering their music and dance traditions, and seeking solace in their African spirituality. Self-care too was a defiant act in a world where whites represented black bodies as grotesque and aesthetically inferior. As such, dyeing and perfuming clothing, shaving, and washing and styling hair was an act of resistance and pride. Although literacy was widely prohibited, enslaved people also learned to read, often in secret, and many women resisted sexual violence through herbal contraceptives and other forms of reproductive autonomy.
But the cost of resistance was significant: enslavers thwarted acts of resistance and rebellion with violent, sometimes lethal, and frequently public forms of punishment intended to instill terror. Yet fugitive slave advertisements published all across the Americas prove that enslaved people never stopped running. The myth of the “content slave” is a fabrication that erases the humanity and resilience of the enslaved and diminishes the brutality of slavery. The stories in this exhibition remind us, and future generations, that resistance to Transatlantic Slavery was everywhere, from acts of organized rebellion to quiet moments of defiance.
Reference Links
Journey From Africa
Some 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Another estimated 7 million people died being marched to the West African coast and 2 million at sea onboard the floating dungeons that were slave ships. They perished from disease, starvation, suicide, and inhumane treatment. Those that disembarked in the Americas survived a harrowing journey...
Journey From Africa
Some 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Another estimated 7 million people died being marched to the West African coast and 2 million at sea onboard the floating dungeons that were slave ships. They perished from disease, starvation, suicide, and inhumane treatment. Those that disembarked in the Americas survived a harrowing journey. Forced together from distinct cultural and ethnic groups, speaking different languages, and terrified as they sailed into the unknown, men, women, boys, and girls bonded in their confusion, fear, and sorrow as they struggled to communicate and comfort each other. Scattered from Argentina to Canada, across the Caribbean, and Europe, these survivors and their descendants constituted the Black Diaspora and their creolization and transformation into blackness began onboard the slave ships.
Many enslaved Africans had once been free, with memories of autonomy depending on their age at capture. Adults and older children would have vividly recalled their families and communities, deepening their psychological torment. Although they were typically forced onto slave ships in West Africa with little to no possessions, they also remembered their spiritualities, and cultural and artistic practices which they recreated in the Americas. The journey across the Atlantic Ocean, known as the Middle Passage, epitomized the inhumanity of European colonization. Documented as cargo and crammed below deck, enslaved individuals were “tight-packed” into the cargo hold with minimal ventilation and sanitation, leading to rampant disease and high mortality rates.
While most enslaved people constituted slave majority populations in tropical and semi-tropical regions dominated by plantations in the US South, the Caribbean, and northern South America, enslaved Africans who arrived in northern regions like the US North and Canada often endured multiple Middle Passages. They frequently became a minority population within an enslaved minority, outnumbered by black Creoles (those who were born in the Americas). Acknowledging the diverse experiences of enslaved African-born people allows us to narrate more complex and accurate histories about what enslaved people endured.
Reference Links
Enslaved Children
Contemplating the suffering of enslaved children is challenging. Today, legal child enslavement seems unfathomable. But children were enslaved alongside men and women, family and strangers in Africa and forced to make the lethal ocean journey to the Americas. Others were born into slavery in the Americas. Archival documents like printed advertisements and correspondence shed light on the plight of enslaved children...
Enslaved Children
Contemplating the suffering of enslaved children is challenging. Today, legal child enslavement seems unfathomable. But children were enslaved alongside men and women, family and strangers in Africa and forced to make the lethal ocean journey to the Americas. Others were born into slavery in the Americas. Archival documents like printed advertisements and correspondence shed light on the plight of enslaved children. Those who survived the Middle Passage had lives of deprivation, abuse, and hard labor awaiting them, and in Canada and the US North, social and cultural isolation was also normal.
The matrilineal order of slavery resulted in enslaved females giving birth to enslaved children, regardless of the race, ethnicity or social status of the father. Incentivized by greed, many white men fathered enslaved children through rape and sexual coercion. Enslaved children were routinely separated from their families through sale. Many like the Bermudian Mary Prince(b. 1788), were made to entertain and care for white children while still children themselves.Racial stereotypes such as the “brutish” black mother and absent black father were cultivated to vilify black parents.
This exhibition is a testament to the belief that children must learn about slavery in accessible and age-appropriate ways, mediated through the guidance of a trusted educator, guardian or caregiver. These histories are inherently difficult, and yet the thoughtful introductions offered by children’s literature can help lay the groundwork for collective remembrance in defense against those who conspire to obliterate or obscure the past.
Reference Links
Enslaved Biography
Uncovering the lived experiences of enslaved people is an important step in understanding the realities of Transatlantic Slavery. However, it is extremely difficult to recuperate an enslaved person’s biography. Considered chattel (moveable personal property) under the law, the enslaved were documented in dehumanizing ways and widely prohibited from becoming literate...
Enslaved Biography
Uncovering the lived experiences of enslaved people is an important step inunderstanding the realities of Transatlantic Slavery. However, it is extremely difficult to recuperate an enslaved person’s biography. Considered chattel (moveable personal property) under the law, the enslaved were documented in dehumanizing ways and widely prohibited from becoming literate. Combined with their overwhelming poverty precipitated by their inability to accrue wealth for themselves, most enslaved people were also materially impoverished and lacked the cultural capital and knowledge to document their own lives or those of their loved ones and communities. All of this was of course strategic on the part of enslavers.
How do you find information on an individual who has been documented as an object, a fragment, a partial entry in a ledger? Scholars work with various documents to reconstituteenslaved biographies, such as estate records, wills, bills of sale, court and tax records, and slave advertisements. Although rare, complete enslaved biographies were also created by individuals who escaped slavery. Most fugitive slave narratives (a genre of book) were written by men who attained literacy and represent a small and exceptional portion of the enslaved population. Published by white abolitionist societies, these biographies were heavily censored to appeal to white female audiences who were considered unable to handle the brutality of slavery that included frequent sexual violence. Therefore, these narratives were often highly sanitized.
Enslaved biographies are an essential tool for educating children about slavery because they shed light on the experience, perceptions, labor and dreams of the enslaved while centering the enslaved person’s perspectives. They illuminate their resilience and resistance while humanizing individuals whose voices were marginalized and erased.
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Reference Links
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Learn more about Slave Resistance:
Charmaine A. Nelson, The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process and Representation(Concord, ON: Captus Press, 2024)
Charmaine A. Nelson, “ ‘she carried with her…a large bundle of wearing apparel belonging to herself’: Slave Dress as Resistance in Portraiture and Fugitive Slave Advertisements,” The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History, eds. Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martin, and Charlene Villaseñor Black (New York: Routledge, 2023)
Sergio A. Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2016)
Delores M. Walters, Gendered Resistance: Women Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013)
John Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, eds. Richard Price and Sally Price (New York City: iUniverse, Inc., 2010)
Steeve O. Buckridge “The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Dress,” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (September 2003), pp. 61-73.
David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the 18th c. Mid-Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly (April 1999), pp. 243-72.
Jan Kurth, “Wayward Wenches and Wives: Runaway Women in the Hudson Valley, N.Y., 1785-1830,” NWSA Journal, vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1988-1989), pp. 199-220.
Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 61, no. 1 (February 1995), pp. 45-76.
Gary A. Donaldson, “A Window on Slave Culture: Dances at Congo Square in New Orleans, 1800-1862,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 69, no. 2 (Spring 1984), pp. 63-72.
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Learn more about The Journey from Africa
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007)
Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” The Slavery Reader, eds. Gad Heuman and James Walvin (London: Routledge, 2003)
Capt. Theodore Canot, Adventures of an African Slaver (New York City: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002)
Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York City: Basic Books, 2002)
A.J. R. Russell-Wood, “Before Columbus: Portugal’s African Prelude to the Middle Passage and Contribution to Discourse on Race and Slavery,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World , eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000)
Eric Williams, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World , eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000)
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: the Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York City: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1997)
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Learn more about Enslaved Children
Jenifer L. Barclay, “Mothering the ‘Useless’: Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color, vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 2014), pp. 115-40.
Ken Donovan, “Female Slaves as Sexual Victims in Ile Royal,” Acadiensis, XLIII, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2014), pp. 147-156.
Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York City: NYU Press, 2011)
Thomas A. Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 3 (September 2011), pp. 445-64.
Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 2011)
Barbara Bush, “African Caribbean Slave Mothers and Children: Traumas of Dislocation and Enslavement across the Atlantic World,” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1/2 (March-June 2010), pp. 69-94.
Charmaine A. Nelson, “Racing Childhood: Representations of Black Girls in Canadian Art,” Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (NYC: Routledge, 2010)
Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Hilary McD. Beckles, “Property Rights in Pleasure: The Marketing of Enslaved Women’s Sexuality,” Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World , eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers Limited, 2000)
Cheryll Ann Cody, “Cycles of Work and of Childbearing: Seasonality in Women’s Lives on Low Country Plantations,” More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in The Americas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996)
Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and their Possible Implications,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 35, no. 2 (April 1978), pp. 357-74.
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Learn more about Enslaved Biography:
<span class=”s10″>Harvey Amani Whitfield, </span><span class=”s11″>Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes </span><span class=”s10″>(Toronto & Buffalo: University of Toronto Press; Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 2022)</span>
<span class=”s10″>Frederick Douglass, </span><span class=”s11″>Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and American Slave</span><span class=”s10″>, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2018)</span>
<span class=”s10″>Marisa J. Fuentes, </span><span class=”s11″>Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive</span><span class=”s10″> (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) </span>
<span class=”s10″>Solomon Northup, </span><span class=”s11″>12 Years a Slave</span><span class=”s10″> (Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2014)</span>
<span class=”s10″>Henry Louis Gates, Jr., </span><span class=”s11″>The Classic Slave Narratives: The Life of Ola</span><span class=”s11″>udah Equiano; The History of Mary Prince; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</span><span class=”s10″> (New York City: Signet Classics, 2012) </span>
<span class=”s10″>David F. Dorr, </span><span class=”s11″>A Colored Man Round the World</span><span class=”s10″>, ed. Malini Johar Schueller (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999)</span>
<span class=”s10″>Mary Prince, </span><span class=”s11″>The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave</span><span class=”s10″>,</span><span class=”s10″> ed. Moira Ferguson</span><span class=”s10″> (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997)</span>
<p class=”s12″><span class=”s10″>Marcel </span><span class=”s10″>Trudel, </span><span class=”s11″>Dictionnaire des Esclaves et de leurs Propriétaires au Canada Français </span><span class=”s10″>(La Salle: Éditions Hurtubise HMH Ltée, 1990)</span></p>
<span class=”s10″>Harriet A. Jacobs, </span><span class=”s11″>Incidents in the Life of. Slave Girl: Written by Herself</span><span class=”s10″>, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)</span>