Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts is a hybrid graphic novel-memoir by Dr. Rebecca Hall, detailing a history that you probably haven’t read about before. (I know I hadn’t). Along with illustrations from Hugo Martinez, Hall—a lawyer, historian, and activist—brings history to life. She was gracious enough to answer some questions via email about the book.
You have your JD and a PhD in history. You’ve written essays and articles on subjects like climate justice, fossil fuels, history, and intersectional feminist theory. What was the impetus to write this book?
Wake is based on my 2004 PhD dissertation, which took me 4 years to research and write. I felt passionate about not letting what I found languish behind the wall of academia. I wanted to get this story into the mainstream.
Why did you decide to make it a graphic novel?
I have always been a fan of graphic novels and what can be accomplished with the graphic medium. It combines linear text with “all at once” art in a powerful way. It is SO much more than “a book with some illustrations” because the art and text work together to tell the story. I never imagined that I would be writing a graphic novel, but when I sat down to try to figure out how to get this story into the mainstream, the graphic medium made sense. So much of the story of Wake is about temporality, about the past pushing into the present, and that worked here. Also, the documentation of the slave revolts is so fragmentary, it became important for me to be a character in the book, to narrate the stories.
You toy with genre in the book—it is part memoir and part history, but it also gives stories to these women warriors. How did this merging of genre come about?
After figuring out that I needed to narrate the book to hold the recovered fragments together, I became a character in the book. I believe if you’re going to write, then write what is true and scary. The research process for my dissertation was intense, and I decided I needed to tell the truth of this story. All of this—the revolts, the forces hiding this history, my research experience, our whole society—takes place in the wake of slavery, so I had to write about that. It turned into a very strange book that is hard to describe!
Do you have a writing routine? How has the pandemic affected it?
Much of my process for book creation can occur in the interstices of my daily life: the research, applying for grants, organizing material, and so on. I have found, however, that this type of creative writing requires me to be basically in retreat. I will go to a city where I don’t know anyone, rent an Airbnb for a month, order food in and write write write. I get fully immersed and being interrupted can throw me off my flow. I had to learn that I was kind of a diva like that. Luckily our son is full-grown and my wife supports my work and what is necessary to accomplish it. My cat can get pissy when I return home though.
I was doing research for my current book as a scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center in New York City. I was there for Fall 2020 and some of Spring 2021. It was a weird way to spend a pandemic. It probably would have been just as weird anywhere else though.
I found it so fascinating that the more women aboard a slave ship, the more likely a revolt would occur. This is such a striking point of information, and yet past historians wrote it off. Do you see things like this changing in the future; more careful analysis of women, particularly Black women, in history, and what the silence is saying?
I hope this changes in the future! But it is a constant struggle to obtain the skills, the time, and the resources to do this work of historical recovery, and once that is done, it is another struggle to get it into mainstream discourse. The silence about Black women’s agency and resistance is actually very loud. It works to pacify and disempower. The silence does specific work. It shapes a false world view where we are merely acted upon. It is actual violence.
How do you think the creative community can support those who aren’t cis men, and mothers, especially?
When I was doing the preliminary writing on women in slave revolts, our son was a baby. A very colicky baby who would only stop screaming and sleep when he was on my body. I have so many memories of him draped across me while I was typing away on the computer. They are fond memories now, but it was no fun at the time! I had a partner, his other mom, and she was in graduate school also, and we worked it out. But I know many mothers with partners who aren’t as supportive.
Someone like me—Black, a lesbian, a mom, not good at (or interested in) conforming to gender norms—we are largely frozen out of spaces that have any resources that can help us be successful and make an impact as writers. We need to build alternative support systems and do that work. It is frustrating because other people just get to write.
Very true. What are you struggling with, as a parent and as a writer, right now?
My son is 23. He is a six-foot-tall Black man, and his passion is sales (he did NOT get that from me). So he goes door-to-door selling Solar and I worry about his safety ALL the time. We spend time on the phone debriefing how he can approach his work in white neighborhoods. We can try to prepare, but the fact is that racist police violence is out of our control.
I am not actually struggling as a writer at the moment. But I will need funding and research grants for my current book, so I am beginning that process.
What books inspire you, and what are you reading right now?
I read a lot. At least 4 hours a day. I read histories and primary sources for my writing. I also read for fun. I’m one of those weirdos who would usually rather read than watch TV. For work right now I am reading No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Hailey. Because the books I read for work are intense, for fun I read things that are completely different. I like reading science or science fiction. So I am also reading How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, and re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness.
What’s on the horizon for you? I am working on the next graphic novel with the working title Taking Freedom: Black Women and Emancipation. It tells stories of the many ways Black women fought for their freedom during the Civil War, intervening in the dominant narrative that freedom was “given” to enslaved people. I’m working on the chapter now that describes women tearing apart their owner’s plantations and redistributing the wealth. My current favorite story, gleaned from a slaver woman’s distressed letter to a friend, tells about how the women refuse to do any work and they killed all the livestock and had a huge feast. She is so upset! I call this set of sources my whiny slave-owning Karens. Definitely easier to read than the hundreds of slave ship’s logs I had to read for my last book.
Author photo credit: Cat Palmer