Copper Sun

This chapter begins with a run-down of the deaths of the people Amari knows who were “left on the side of the road for the hyenas” (21). Other coffles of slaves join them, and they eventually make it to a city where “white men [were] walking arm in arm with black men, with no chains on either of them” (22). Amari catches a few words that their captors repeat: slave, price, and Cape Coast. The crowd is eventually separated, the men from the women, and shoved into a large, dark building where Amari can smell “sweat and fear…body wastes and hopelessness” (24). Bread is thrown in, but the women fight for every scrap. A larger woman comes over to Amari and offers her a piece. Amari tells her that she feels “like a broken drum—hollow, crushed unable to make a sound” (25). The woman tells her she “must learn to make music once more” (25). This woman, Afi, has been sold once before, and her white man grew tired of her and sold her back. She gives Amari the details of how they will all be sold and sent into the sea.