Amos Fortune, Free Man

At Mun Shi is the son of an African chief, born around 1710, whose peaceful boyhood ends when slave traders raid his village and kill his father. Shipped across the Atlantic on the vessel White Falcon, he arrives in New England renamed Amos and sold to a Quaker named Caleb Copeland, who treats him decently but never frees him. After Copeland's death, Amos is sold again, this time to a tanner named Ichabod Richardson, who eventually teaches him the tanning trade Amos will practice for the rest of his life. At thirty, Amos finally saves enough to purchase his own freedom, then works for years more to buy freedom for a series of women he marries in turn, Lily, then Lydia after Lily's death, then Violet, and to free Violet's daughter as well. Settling at last in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Amos builds his own tanning business, and in old age owns land, a house, a barn and a working shop of his own. In one late, difficult episode, anger over a theft by his wife sends Amos up Mount Monadnock seeking guidance before he returns able to forgive her, the book closing on that hard won peace rather than on any single triumphant scene.

Parents should know the book fictionalizes a real man's life freely around a documented skeleton of facts, compressing and inventing dialogue and incident, and that its portrayal of slavery and its aftermath, while sympathetic to Amos, reflects the gentler, more reassuring tone typical of the era it was written in.