If your sense of history is a little fuzzy when it comes to dates, I'll start with a little perspective. The US Civil War didn't begin until 1861 and slavery wasn't abolished until 1865. Some states had passed laws to abolish slavery before then, but they were very much a hodge podge of different plans and processes. New York, for example, passed its law abolishing the practice in 1799 but it was a gradual rollout and slavery wasn't fully outlawed there until 1827. Southern states, of course, had no such laws independent of federal ones, which is why the Underground Railroad existed to help enslaved people move to Northern areas. Some, however, pursued other, less covert means of attempting to gain their freedom and Nat Turner famously led a rebellion in Virginia that resulted in the deaths of over 50 people in 1931. Turner made national headlines and was executed later that year, in part to make very public the notion that enslaved people attempting to gain their freedom would be thoroughly and aggressively punished. This was, of course, a scare tactic designed to try to counter the fear that slave owners had of what a retribution-minded enslaved person could do.
That is all offerred in the book's introduction before getting to the main story. And it's with this backdrop that Prudence Crandall made her Canterbury Female Boarding School, that itself had opened only 1831, an integrated institution welcoming Black girls and women beginning in 1832. While locals tolerated, often with some measure of mocking dismissal, the idea of educating women, they found the idea of intergration downright insufferable. Crandall soon found all of her white students removed by their parents, and rebuilding the class of only Black girls and women turned out to be a slow process, but its unique opportunity for Black women did eventually draw a number of students from all over.
Crandall, not suprisingly, faced a fair amount of opposition. When being publicly snubbed didn't work, she was cut off from getting supplies locally. Her father had to travel a fair ways to obtain basics, and his longer trips led to physical harassment. Threats to both the school in general and people associated with it individually increased, and intimidation tactics include everything from smearing the front door with feces to poisoning the school's well water. With those means proving ineffective, legal means came into play and laws were passed to make Crandrall's school illegal, leading to her arrest and imprisonment. Crandall, with the help and funding of the absolishment movement, were able to fight these charges legally and eventually won in court. This, not surprisingly, enraged some locals who attacked the school and burnt it to the ground. This drove Crandall away for good. And while she and many of her students did well elsewhere, the town essentially resumed its technically free but still heavily segregated platform from before.
The story is told well overall. Fert's artwork has almost a Mary Blair quality about it and Lupano is impressively restrained in his dialogue, letting the artwork do much of the heavy lifting. I would've liked to have a seen a little more with regard to Crandall's motivations, though. Were her convictions exclusively rooted in her faith, or were there any life experiences prior to the 1830s that influenced her thinking? Perhaps that veers a little more into speculation than what they wanted to do here; the book sticks to the facts (well, the facts as I'm familiar with them at any rate!) and the basic human behavior of the people of Canterbury is sadly predictable, again, as I suggested with the book's subtitle.
As far as I'm aware, this is the first comic to cover Crandall or her school and I'm definitely very appreciative of that. There are an infinite number of stories of Black histories that haven't been covered very well -- or at all -- in the medium and I'm thrilled to see more of them, rather than another biography of Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks (impressive a woman as they each are). I think Crandall's story isn't widely enough known, and I'd love to see more of these stories from Lupano and Fer.
Surrounded actually came out a year ago, so it still should be readily available from your local book retailer. It was published by NBM and lists at $24.99 US. However with NBM having recently been purchased by Ablaze, I'm unsure if that means the book will remain in print and for how long.
0 comments:
Post a Comment