Annotated+Book+List-+Unit+on+Slavery

The students for this class are 11th grade Accelerated. Most of the students in this class are on target when it comes to learning level and ability. There are a couple students who are at a lower learning level and instruction can be differentiated for them at any time. There are also a couple students who are at a higher learning level than the other students. These students are pushed to think more critically about concepts. This book list includes titles that are easy to read and understand, and include simple language; it also contains more complex titles, with intricate language. This book list meets the needs of all levels of learners. These students are going to learn about slavery in their history and math courses as well, and will learn the background historical information. This course is where they can dive into to the feelings, emotions, and dreams of slaves.
 * Annotated Book List **

For this unit, students are exploring the question, “//What is a slave’s dream of freedom?”// Students will be looking at how this question is portrayed through literature. Students will read journal entries, poems, narratives, and listen to songs to understand the lives of slaves and what freedom meant to them. The ten titles used for this annotated book list are meant to help students understand in depth how slaves were treated and how they longed to be free. Students will get to read stories from the perspective of slaves, to follow their live story of being a slave. They will read how people who were once free became enslaved, how masters treated their slaves, how the slaves felt, and how they became free. Students will be able to answer the unit question clearly, using their chosen book as references.

 **10 Book Titles on Slavery **

1. **Butler, Octavia. //Kindred//**//.// **Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.** Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

2. **Grissom, Kathleen. //The Kitchen House.// New York: Touchstone Books, 2010. Print.** When a white servant girl violates the order of plantation society, she unleashes a tragedy that exposes the worst and best in the people she has come to call her family. Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin. Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous truths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.

3. **Hill, Lawrence. //Someone Knows My Name.// New York: W.W. Norton Co., 2008. Print.** Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom—and of the knowledge she needs to get home. Sold to an indigo trader who recognizes her intelligence, Aminata is torn from her husband and child and thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan, Aminata helps pen the //Book of Negroes//, a list of blacks rewarded for service to the king with safe passage to Nova Scotia. There Aminata finds a life of hardship and stinging prejudice. When the British abolitionists come looking for "adventurers" to create a new colony in Sierra Leone, Aminata assists in moving 1,200 Nova Scotians to Africa and aiding the abolitionist cause by revealing the realities of slavery to the British public. This captivating story of one woman's remarkable experience spans six decades and three continents and brings to life a crucial chapter in world history.

= 4 Jacobs, Harriet. //Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl//. New York: Signet Classic, 2000. Print = = This autobiographical account by a former slave is one of the few extant narratives written by a woman. Written and published in 1861, it delivers a powerful portrayal of the brutality of slave life. Jacobs speaks frankly of her master's abuse and her eventual escape, in a tale of dauntless spirit and faith. = = = 5. **James, Marlon. //The Book of Night Women//**. **New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Print.** The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion-between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page recently--and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most intriguing mysteries.

**6.** **McKissack, Particia C. //A Picture of Freedom- The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl.// New York: Scholstic Inc., 1997. Print. ** It's 1859 and Clotee, a twelve-year-old slave, has the most wonderful, terrible secret. She knows that if she shares it with the wrong person, she will face unimaginable consequences. What is her secret? While doing her job of fanning her master's son during his daily lessons, Clotee has taught herself to read and write. However, she soon learns that the tutor, Ely Harms, has a secret of his own. In a time when literacy is one of the most valuable skills to have, Clotee is determined to use her secret to save herself, and her family. 7. **Morrison, Toni. //Beloved//. New York: Vintage International, 2004. Print.** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, //Beloved// is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">8. **Northup, Solomon. //Twelve Years a Slave.//** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It is one of the few portraits of American by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">9. **Perking-Valdez, Dolen. //Wench.// New York: Amistad, 2010. Print.** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">* wench \'wench\ //n//. from Middle English "//wenchel//," 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this tranquil retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret. Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory–but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.To run is to leave behind everything these women value most–friends and families still down South–and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances–all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">10<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">**Walker, Alice. //The Color Purple.// London: Women’s Press, 1992. Print.**. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to “Mister,” a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister’s letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self..

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12px;">Information on all titles can be found on www.goodreads.com