The Amistad “whitewash”
The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad, A Graphic Novel
by David Lester and Mark Rediker with Paul Buhle
Boston: Beacon Press, 2026
$18.95 / 9780807016909
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
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In his third graphic novel covering American history “from the bottom up,” Vancouver artist David Lester has pushed his black and white graphic talents to a new intensity with the story of a slave rebellion aboard a ship called El Amistad.
The story will be familiar to readers who recall the 1997 Steven Spielberg film about the Spanish ship and its human cargo. But Lester and his American historian collaborators argue that Spielberg focused on the trial of the African slaves, yielding a “whitewashed” account that failed to feature the courage of the captives in overthrowing their oppressors.
A quick summary: 53 African slaves from Sierra Leone slipped their chains in 1839 and commandeered the Amistad off the north coast of Cuba. They killed the captain and, led by a charismatic leader named Cinque, hoped to sail home. Instead, American authorities arrested the slaves and they spent the next three years in Connecticut jail and inside a courtroom. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court found that they were “illegally enslaved and granted them their freedom.”
Artist Lester shapes this history into a fiercely illustrated chronicle that engages readers in the lives of the rebels and depicts the rebels’ actions and their strategic thinking. Vividly drawn panels that tell the story immerse the reader in this fast-paced narrative. Lester’s stark facial images evoke the pain, suffering, and anger of the rebels. The illustrations also reveal the fear and hatred in the faces of slave owners and the complicit politicians who supported slavery.
In one pivotal scene in the first of the book’s three parts, “War,” the story is related from the memory of Margru who was 10 years old at the time. “The Africans are arising,” screams one of the slavers. “Get back in the hold, you savages,” demands another. Ferocious hand-to-hand combat ensues. The images are black and white but the imagination tells us the scenes are blood red, too. “The rebellion is over,” says Margru. The slavers jump overboard and the Amistad is in Cinque’s command. “We must go home,” he says, “to Freetown . . . Toward the rising sun.”
In “Trials,” the second part, Lester depicts the action through a meeting with James Covey, 20, a black man who serves as an interpreter. “While unloading the ship I heard the strange sound of a man counting to ten in Mende [an African language], he said. “Turned out the little girls of the Amistad had taught him to count.” The rebels welcomed Covey because “at last, we can tell the true story of what happened aboard the Amistad.”
Like Lester’s other American history novels previously reviewed here, Revolution By Fire and Prophet Against Slavery, the action steams off the page through simply wrought black and white scenes that allow readers to literally feel the “electric effects” of the rebellion and its aftermath.
The authors call the Amistad uprising “one of the best-known examples of resistance to bondage in all of American history,” declaring that “for too long the story . . . was told ‘from above’ stressing the legal battle rather than the uprising itself.” They criticize Spielberg for failing to show how the rebels “thought, acted, and, in the end, triumphed.”
What is “bottom up” history? Paul Buhle describes it as history “to help us envision a new and better world for all.” It is history written from the perspective of the ordinary person, in this case someone who rises up against tyranny. Marcus Rediker adds that such history offers “an important lesson for our own times,” possibly a reference to the current Trump Administration’s brutal treatment of immigrants and Black Americans.
The historians cite two seminal works that also correct history from above. Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) and Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James (1938). The former taught us about the failure to rebuild American democracy after the Civil War. The latter documents the Haitian or San Domingo revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. Both contain lessons that should resonate today.
As the authors note: “With great energy and style, these preeminent scholar-activists converged on a central conclusion: Black people had, contrary to previous histories and popular expectations, fought for their freedom.” We now can add The Black Schooner to our list of such books as part of “a saga of Black history.”
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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron wrote about Tom McGauley and has reviewed recent books by Dan Pontefract, Roy Innes, Whit Fraser, Jim Harding [ed.], Steven Scanlan, and Joline Martin for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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