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    Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem
    Ebook50 pages9 minutes

    Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem

    By Marilyn Nelson

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    There is a skeleton in the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut. It has been in the town for over 200 years. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of a slave name 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. Merilyn Nelson wrote The Manumission Requiem to commemorate Fortune's life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader's appreciation of the poem.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBoyds Mills Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2016
    ISBN9781629795881
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem
    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

    4.5/5

    19 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I 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.
    • 4/5
      (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.)
    • 4/5
      Powerful 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.
    • 4/5
      This 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.