Amos Fortune, Free Man

“In the village of At-mun-shi the people were gathering for their mystic dance that would welcome in the time of herbage, the time for the planting of corn.”

Because Yates has no historical records of Fortune’s life prior to enslavement, she must invent all of the details of Chapter 1. Yates leans on common tropes of “tribal” people, such as dancing for the harvest celebration, to illustrate the “African” world of the At-mun-shi people. Her use of the word “mystic” here underscores the belief that African customs are “exotic” and unknowable.

“The At-mun-shi were as pagan as all the tribes in Africa, but they were peaceable and they were, as well, intense in their love of freedom.”

The word “but” signals a contrast between “pagan” (non-Christian in this context) and “peaceable,” meaning that there is an assumption that the African people from which Fortune originates are exceptional in their peacefulness. This quote is also where Yates first introduces the theme of freedom, which reverberates throughout the entire novel.

“Monkeys, chattering in their aerial homes, peered out at the sight of the canoes, and swung from limb to limb to travel with them for a while.”

In Chapter 2, Yates describes the various animals observing the captured At-mun-shi as they travel down the river in the canoe. The monkeys observing them foreshadows their arrival on the auction block, where the At-mun-shi people are scrutinized and made to look like “animals” in Yates’s words.