Time's Memory - Hardcover

Lester, Julius

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374371784 ISBN 13: 9780374371784

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2006

Synopsis

Amma is the creator god, the master of life and death, and he is worried. His people have always known how to take care of the spirits of the dead – the nyama – so that they don’t become destructive forces among the living. But amid the chaos of the African slave trade and the brutality of American slavery, too many of his people are dying and their souls are being ignored in this new land. Amma sends a young man, Ekundayo, to a plantation in Virginia where he becomes a slave on the eve of the Civil War. Amma hopes that Ekundayo will be able to find a way to bring peace to the nyama before it is too late. But Ekundayo can see only sorrow in this land – sorrow in the ownership of people, in the slaves who have been separated from their children and spouses, in the restless spirits of the dead, and in his own forbidden relationship with his master’s daughter.

How Ekundayo finds a way to bring peace to both the dead and the living makes this an unforgettable journey into the slave experience and Julius Lester’s most powerful work to date.

 

Time's Memory is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

About this title

About the Author

JULIUS LESTER has written more than forty books of fiction,
nonfiction, and poetry for children and adults. He lives in
Belchertown, Massachusetts.

Reviews

Grade 9 Up More than a picture of slavery through the eyes of those enslaved or their captors, Lester's narrative evokes spiritual images of Mali's Dogon people. The story begins in Africa where the nyama, or life force, of a murdered spiritual leader is carried to America on a slave ship as a seed passed to his daughter through a kiss. The seed springs forth through the help of Lebe, the serpent, into the form of a young man, Ekundayo, whose mission is to bring peace to the growing numbers of spirits swarming chaotically over this new land. The creator god, in the form of a big bird, transports Ekundayo to Virginia in the body of a slave, Nathaniel, who secretly loves his master's daughter, Ellen, whom he's known since childhood and who taught him to read and write. As Nathaniel, Ekundayo learns the stories and tribulations of the slaves. He struggles to discover how he can bring peace to the dead he sees as gray fog hovering over the slave quarters. On the eve of the Civil War, Nathaniel/Ekundayo has visions of the dead who tell him the future as well as the past and he sets a course that will carry on for generations. This is a powerful novel for mature readers. It is fraught with sorrow, brutality, triumph, and joy. In the end, Lester projects hope that lost souls and forbidden relationships can find peace, acceptance, and happiness. Kathy Lehman, Thomas Dale High School Library, Chester, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Gr. 8-11. In his powerful historical fiction, Lester often confronts the harsh realism of slavery and imagines the personal experiences of his own ancestors. Now, in what he calls one of his "most autobiographical" stories, he draws on the Dogon religion of West Africa to create the tale of a nyama spirit of the dead, which he sets on the eve of the Civil War. Sent by the creator to America, the spirit inhabits the body of Nat, 17, who lives on a Virginia plantation. Nat's father hates all whites and leads a brutal uprising, but Nat has grown up with the master's daughter, Ellen, and they love each other (his father calls Nat "a white folks' nigger"). The spiritual stuff is sometimes confusing, including the tidy ending, in which Nat and Ellen, who is resurrected from the dead, are happy together in Africa. But Lester makes the history immediate while never denying the horrors of the roundups, the journey to America, and plantation life. Above all, the beautifully individualized characters reveal the lies of slavery. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Time's Memory
I lay within the body of the woman who was called Amina
and I listened to the silences between the beats of hearts that
beat no more and the wind in breaths that no longer breathed.
I saw with eyes that were only sockets in skulls. Though I was
no larger than the twinkle of a star, I already knew that lives
did not consist only of what happened during one's brief span of
years. No. Each person is the sum of the generations that went
before, generations of people whose names have been forgotten,
whose faces have sunk below where memory can go. Yet those
generations live within everyone, pulsating with each heartbeat
and each breath.
I listened to the blood roaring through her body, and within the
cacophony I found the memories of her brief sixteen years, the
memories of her mother and father, their mother and father,
and their mother and father, and on back to unnumbered time
when no one counted the risings and settings of the sun and
there were no months or years but only Time as broad and
without end as the universe.
But as intently as I listened, as arduously as I searched, I could
not find the reason why I had been conceived. Neither did her
blood tell me where we were being taken nor what I was to do
when I got there.
When Amma, the creator god and master of life and death,
had Amina's father place me inside the woman, he told me my
name was Ekundayo, Sorrow Becomes Joy. Surrounded by
sorrow deeper than any sea and wider than any sky, I thought
I had been misnamed.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374371784
• ISBN 13: 9780374371784
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230