The Slave Dancer
by Paula Fox
Summary
Thirteen year old Jessie Bollier, a poor white boy in 1840s New Orleans known around his neighborhood for his skill on the fife, is kidnapped off the street one night and forced aboard the Moonlight, a ship engaged in the illegal Atlantic slave trade years after its official abolition. His job on the crossing is grim and specific: playing his fife to force the enslaved Africans chained below decks to dance, a forced exercise meant only to keep them saleable rather than to show them any mercy. Jessie witnesses the full brutality of the Middle Passage firsthand, the deaths from disease and cruelty, and when the ship is pursued by a patrol vessel enforcing the ban on the trade, the crew begins throwing chained captives overboard to destroy the evidence rather than be caught. In the chaos of the ship eventually wrecking, Jessie and a young enslaved boy named Ras are the only two who make it to shore alive together, and an escaped formerly enslaved man named Daniel helps hide and guide them once they reach land. Ras is sent onward to freedom in the North while Jessie eventually makes his way home, permanently changed by what he witnessed; the novel's final pages jump forward to Jessie as an adult, unable ever again to bear the sound of music, a lasting wound the ship left in him.
Reading it is deliberately hard going, unflinching about physical suffering in a way meant to make a reader a witness rather than an observer at a comfortable distance, and Fox refuses her narrator, and her reader, any relief or redemption for what he took part in even unwillingly. It is short but slow to read for its intensity, and it remains one of the most disputed choices the Newbery committee has ever made for exactly that content.
Historical Context & Significance
Bradbury Press published The Slave Dancer in October 1973, and the American Library Association gave Paula Fox the 1974 Newbery Medal for it, over a single honor book, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising.
The win provoked immediate, sustained criticism alongside the praise. Julius Lester, writing in the New York Times, argued that the novel described the horrors of the Middle Passage without recreating them, and that if history is to become real a reader must live it as if it were their own life; in The Slave Dancer, he wrote, readers are only spectators when they should have been fellow sufferers, as slave traders and as slaves. Later critics have pressed the same point, questioning whether the enslaved Africans in the book are given voices and agency of their own. Kirkus Reviews, by contrast, praised how the book delivered the trade's inhumanity straight to the stomach rather than only to the heart. The dispute has followed the book into every later discussion of who gets to narrate slavery's history and how.