"Who could tell this story with any kind of balance?"
Enthusiastically, I started reading everything I could find on slavery and especially the Middle Passage. I searched out and wrote down all of the factual incidents in sequential order, reading some personal accounts by former slave-ship captains, slave traders, and various European historians.
I expected the descriptions of horror of the slave forts and inhumane treatment on the journey aboard the slave ships. But some of the writers' overbearing opinions, even religious rationalizations and arguments for the continuance of the slave trade made me feel, the more words I read, that I should try to tell this story with as few words as possible, if any.
Callous indifference or outright brutal characterizations of Africans are embedded in the language of the Western World. It is a language so infused with direct and indirect racism that it would be difficult, if not impossible, using this language in my book, to project anything black as positive.
This gave me a final reason for attempting to tell the story through art alone. I believe strongly that with a picture book any African in this world could pick up and see and feel what happened to us on those ships."
THE MIDDLE PASSAGE © TOM FEELINGS
