ABSTRACT
Based on a true story, Irene Smalls and Jon Onye Lockard’s 1995 picture book Ebony Sea takes place on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia on the banks of the Wateree River. The narrator tells the story of Benriver, an Ebo and a former slave who once could fly because he is part man and part spirit, who came to South Carolina with a large group of Ebos in the bowels of a slave ship. These Ebos kept so silent that the slaves on shore feared them. When the group’s leader emerged, she was “A little bit of a thing, a woman. At the head of this crowd of kings and clowns, babes and brawny men, was a small woman with her head held so high and so proud it looked as if it were made of the blackest onyx stone.”1 This woman, still wearing the red handkerchief in which she was captured in Africa, led this whole group of Ebos, chained and shackled together, from the banks of the river right into the Wateree (fig. 6.1).
