Amos Fortune, Free Man

Elizabeth Yates''s Amos Fortune, Free Man won the 1951 Newbery Medal and tells the life of a real man. At-mun was born in West Africa around 1710, captured as a teenager, and carried to Massachusetts aboard a slave ship. Renamed Amos Fortune, he was enslaved for most of his life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, trained as a tanner, and did not purchase his own freedom until he was around sixty. He then used his tannery earnings to buy the freedom of several other enslaved people, settled in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and left money to the town''s school and church at his death in 1801.

The book is valuable for a specific reason: it puts slavery in New England, which surprises many students who have absorbed the idea that it was confined to the South. Amos is bought and sold in Massachusetts by ordinary townspeople, and his freedom is a transaction he must fund himself.

Families should know that the book is a product of 1950. Yates writes Amos as notably patient and forbearing, and modern readers and scholars have criticized the novel for softening the brutality of his circumstances and for a tone that can read as accepting of them. That does not make it unusable — it makes it a good candidate for reading alongside the criticism. Asking students why a 1950 white author might have told the story this way, and comparing it to a first-person account such as Olaudah Equiano''s narrative, turns a limitation into the lesson.

The reading level suits grades 5-8. Amos Fortune''s gravestone still stands in Jaffrey, and his surviving account books make good primary-source companions.