Tonya Bolden - Pathfinders: The Journeys of 16 Extraordinary Black Souls

For Rodney J. Reynolds and Audrey Peterson, publisher and editor of American Legacy magazine, this books inspiration

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bolden, Tonya, author.

Title: Pathfinders : The amazing journey of 16 extraordinary black souls / Tonya Bolden.

Description: New York : Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Audience: Age 10 to 14.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043356 | ISBN 9781419714559 | eISBN 9781613129739

Subjects: LCSH: African AmericansBiographyJuvenile literature. | Successful peopleUnited StatesBiographyJuvenile literature.

Classification: LCC E185.96 .B569 2016 | DDC 920.0092/96073dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043356

Text copyright 2017 Tonya Bolden

Book and jacket design by Think Studio: thinkstudionyc.com

: Aspiration (1936), oil on canvas, by Aaron Douglas. This painting features a man standing beside a globe holding a carpenters angle and a compass, another man with a chemistry beaker, and a woman with a book. They stand upon a plinth, raised above shackled arms, looking forward to a great city on a hill. Our three sojourners are on a quest for success.

For illustration credits, see .

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Contents

Over the centuries countless blacks in America have done amazing things against the odds.Had big, bold dreams.Pursued passions.Caught up with their callings.Charted courses to success.Pathfinders.

In this book youll find sketches of sixteen such people. Here you will meet a man who made magic along with one who believed that he could fly and a woman of great mystery. Here you will meet people who went on adventures, took chances, maximizing their talents and abilities. More than a few had a lot to overcome. More than a few knew hardships and tragedies when young.

To round out their stories, there are sidebars with tidbits of historynot everything that happened during a subjects lifetime, just a sampling of events that made up the context of his or her life. With these sketches you will also find brief mentions of people (and in one case places) who have something in common with the subject, to underscore that this architect or that mathematician was not alone in a profession or pursuit. Not an isolated success.

Most of these Pathfinders have been dear to my heart for years. A few I learned about relatively recently from American Legacy magazine. Whether old acquaintances or new, all inspire me. All remind me that so much is possible. May their journeys motivate you to dream, reach, soarbecome a Pathfinder yourself! Above all, as W.E.B. Du Bois, trailblazing scholar-activist best known for his book The Souls of Black Folk, urged, As you live, believe in Life!

The title page of Venture Smiths memoir. This edition was published by a relative years after Ventures death.

VentureSmith

c. 17271805

Born Broteer Furro, this eldest son of a prince was proud of his heritage, proud to be an African. Had he not been, he might never have survived years of ordeals and, in the end, triumphed.

Broteer was ten or so when members of an enemy tribe raided his West African village. When the attack was over, his father was dead and he, bludgeoned and roped, a captive. Next came a four-hundred-mile forced march to the coast, imprisonment in a slave castles dungeon, then confinement on the Charming Susanna, a slave ship.

With Broteer and ninety other Africans, the Charming Susanna set sail in late spring 1739. Some seventy days and one smallpox outbreak later, it docked at Bridgetown, Barbados. There, most of the seventy-four kidnapped Africans who had survived the gruesome journey were sold to planters.

Broteer was not among them. A ships officer, Robinson Mumford, had already bought him for four gallons of rum and a piece of calico. Mumford decided to start the boys American life in Newport, Rhode Island, where a sister of his would have the task of teaching the child English and how to be a slave.

So there Broteer was in September 1739, in a strange world, around strange people, and coming to terms with a strange, new name: Venture. Mumford renamed him that because he had purchased the boy with his own private venture (that is, capital, such as goods or cash).

The attack on Ventures village; the murder of his father; Ventures abduction; his separation from his mother, his siblings, his friends, his people; the fetid hold of the Charming Susanna; the abuse from different owners in Newport, then on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound, then in Stonington, Connecticut, then in Hartford, then in Stonington again

Nothing broke Ventures spirit. Nothing destroyed his will to be free again, his refusal to be a slave.

In 1761, when he was in his early thirties, Venture, standing over six feet tall and weighing about three hundred pounds, convinced his fifth owner, the Stonington shipbuilder and merchant Oliver Smith Jr., to let him buy his freedom. With the bargain struck, as a poet put it, Venture spun money out of sweat.

Sweat from nighttime seine fishing and lobster trapping, then selling his catch.

Sweat from daytime planting and harvesting of produce to peddle.

Sweat from chopping and stacking four hundred cords of firewoodat least a thousand tonsduring a six-month stint on Long Island.

Sweat from these sideline jobs atop labors for his owner.

Come spring 1765, after four years of paying for himself in installments, Venture had his libertyfor seventy-one pounds and two shillings, the cost of hundreds of acres of land. Business concluded, I left Col. Smith once for all. Taking the mans last name with him, Venture geared up for another goal: to free his wife and children, all held by his third owner, another man in Stonington.

With his brawn (chopping wood, farming, fishing, whaling) and with his brains (buying and selling land at a profit, trading), Venture Smith had his entire family out of slavery by spring 1775. He also had a place for them to live: ten acres overlooking Salmon River Cove in Haddam Neck, Connecticut. He built a home, a farm, and a boatyard in that village. He eventually owned more than one hundred acres.