The Cloud People
An illustration pictures a man picking tobacco and looking up toward the sky. In the clouds are an older black at a voting booth, a young female marching with her fist raised, and a young male in graduation robes. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the voter, marcher, and graduate, respective, draped in chalky white letters: BLM. This illustration becomes a symbol of the modern-day movement within its history lesson of the horrors of the past.
Legacy
A poem titled legacy features an impressive two-page spread of notable figures in black American history. The background is less sharply focused and more impressionistic with sometimes barely perceptible images of the U.S. Capitol still under construction, a prop engine plane, the Statute of Liberty and—even less distinct—multiple mathematic equations. These equations symbolize the essential contributions made by black Americans to the engineering of those iconic architectural creations that instantly signify America.
Happy People
The illustrations of the people of Ndongo before the slave traffickers arrive are starkly marked by the wide smiles of happy villagers. They are showing laughing and relaxing and engaging in the unremarkable daily circumstances of being free without even realizing there is alternative. These images symbolize the fact that the first people who came to America called we routinely refer to as “slaves” were not born that way. They were ripped from living their lives just as freely as the people who paid for them as if they were inhuman property.
The Slave Ship
The full spread illustration of the slave ship which brings the first Africans to the New World is utterly menacing on its own. It is worth enlarging the image to peer closer and try counting how many times you can spot an “X” on either the ship itself or the background sky or the dark water below. There are multiple recurrences of the literal “X” which marks the ship symbolic as crossing out entire lives, families, generations, and history.
American Flags
Flags are everywhere in the book, though not always complete and not always in obvious ways. The story actually kicks off as a school assignment from a teacher to students to “draw a flag that represents your ancestral land.” For instance, what seem to be merely freckles on the right cheek of William Tucker, the first black child born in America, are actually the stars of a flag waving across the bridge of his nose and onto his left cheek on the stripes. Another image is more impressionistic and dominated by violence with the central figure being a young black child holding the familiar “Betsy Ross” flag featuring the stars in a concentric circle as an unidentified weapon has just been discharged seemingly right into his face. This recurrence of various American flags symbolizes the truth that some are fighting mightily against: the dirty parts of black history is American history and cannot be politely separated from the other parts.
