The Color Purple (The Color Purple Collection, #1)

by Alice Walker

Captured in Africa, beginning in the fifteen hundreds, they were marched for months across savannah and rainforest to the coast where slave ships waited to transport them to the New World. At the notorious “slave castles” that dotted (and still dot) the coast of Africa they were forced to kneel before a statue of Jesus, have water sprinkled over their shaven heads by a priest, and have their “old” names taken from them. They were given Christian names that went with their new summarily acquired (with the help of the lash and the threat of annihilation) religion, and then, having been branded on face or body, they were prodded onto the ships, packed, as the cliché goes, like sardines in a can. We will never know how many died of grief, or disease, or starvation. Or how many made the despairing leap into the sea.