Time's Memory

A boy sent by an African god to tend the spirits of the dead struggles to fulfill his duty from within the bonds of slavery in Time's Memory, by National Book Award finalist Julius Lester.

Amma is the creator god, the master of life and death, and he is worried. His people have always known how to take care of the spirits of the dead – the nyama – so that they don't become destructive forces among the living. But amid the chaos of the African slave trade and the brutality of American slavery, too many of his people are dying and their souls are being ignored in this new land.

Amma sends a young man, Ekundayo, to a plantation in Virginia where he becomes a slave on the eve of the Civil War. Amma hopes that Ekundayo will be able to find a way to bring peace to the nyama before it is too late. But Ekundayo can see only sorrow in this land – sorrow in the ownership of people, in the slaves who have been separated from their children and spouses, in the restless spirits of the dead, and in his own forbidden relationship with his master's daughter.

How Ekundayo finds a way to bring peace to both the dead and the living makes this an unforgettable journey into the slave experience and Newbury Honor author Julius Lester's most powerful work to date.

Time's Memory is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

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Time's Memory

A boy sent by an African god to tend the spirits of the dead struggles to fulfill his duty from within the bonds of slavery in Time's Memory, by National Book Award finalist Julius Lester.

Time's Memory is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

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Overview

A boy sent by an African god to tend the spirits of the dead struggles to fulfill his duty from within the bonds of slavery in Time's Memory, by National Book Award finalist Julius Lester.

Time's Memory is a 2007 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374375973
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/21/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	870L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Julius Lester (1939-2018) is the author of over 30 books for children and adults, for which he received numerous awards including a Newbery Honor, Caldecott Honor, Coretta Scott King Award, ALA Notable Book, and Smithsonian Magazine Best Book of the Year. His books include To Be a Slave, The Autobiography of God, John Henry, Time's Memory, and Do Lord Remember Me. He lived in Belchertown, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

From Time’s Memory
I lay within the body of the woman who was called Amina
and I listened to the silences between the beats of hearts that
beat no more and the wind in breaths that no longer breathed.
I saw with eyes that were only sockets in skulls. Though I was
no larger than the twinkle of a star, I already knew that lives
did not consist only of what happened during one’s brief span of
years. No. Each person is the sum of the generations that went
before, generations of people whose names have been forgotten,
whose faces have sunk below where memory can go. Yet those
generations live within everyone, pulsating with each heartbeat
and each breath.
I listened to the blood roaring through her body, and within the
cacophony I found the memories of her brief sixteen years, the
memories of her mother and father, their mother and father,
and their mother and father, and on back to unnumbered time
when no one counted the risings and settings of the sun and
there were no months or years but only Time as broad and
without end as the universe.
But as intently as I listened, as arduously as I searched, I could
not find the reason why I had been conceived. Neither did her
blood tell me where we were being taken nor what I was to do
when I got there.
When Amma, the creator god and master of life and death,
had Amina’s father place me inside the woman, he told me my
name was Ekundayo, Sorrow Becomes Joy. Surroundedby
sorrow deeper than any sea and wider than any sky, I thought
I had been misnamed.

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

• The book is divided into three parts. Why do you think the author structured the book like this? What is the main theme of each part?

• How do the epilogue and prologue act as "bookends" and help you understand who is narrating the story, who is recording the story, and why? How do they work in tandem with the body of the book?

• Why is it important that Nathaniel tell the whole story of his ancestors, from the time they first became enslaved?

• How does Julius Lester's use of a multi-perspective narrative affect the telling of the book?

• The first chapter of Part One opens with Josiah Willingham, a grieving man who has lost his faith in God and who is regretting his part in the slave trade. How does this set the tone for the book?

• Throughout the story, the author offers information to define the word nyama. By the end of the book, what do you understand nyama to mean? How would you compare nyama to similar terms from other religions and philosophies?

• "Words were as alive as any man, woman, or child. They had an odor . . ." (p. 31) On several occasions the truthfulness of a speaker's words is measured by the tangible quality of smell. How do we evaluate someone's words? What do we say when we believe someone's words to be truthful? To be false?

• In Part One, Chapter 5, the author uses the term "Time's memory" for the first time. Julius Lester challenges the concept of linear time in the structure of TIME'S MEMORY. Had you thought of time, of history, in this way before? Why did the author choose this as the title of the book?

• In the Author's Note, Julius Lester states, "The story is perhaps one of the most autobiographical I've ever written." (p. 228) What do you think he means?

• A dream inspired Julius Lester to begin writing TIME'S MEMORY. What role do dreams play in the novel? (e.g., p. 44)

• The narrator says in the Prologue: "We are more than our personal memories." How does this statement affect or change your ideas about memoirs and memoir writing?

• What kind of information would you need to collect or find out in order to write your own "Time's memory"?

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Editorial Reviews

While supernatural spiritual threads often weave their way into tales of escape from slavery, including Lester's own recent The Old African, this book is notable for the way in which the author brings the godly to the human realm. Ekundayo (a nyama or "soul") travels across the Middle Passage within the body of a 16-year-old captive. Lester makes the voyage plausible, as well as the nyama's subsequent release, because of the way he characterizes the slave ship's captain and the captain's circumstances (the spirit of his recently deceased wife plays a part, for instance). A breathtaking scene involving Lebe, the "first hogan" (taking the form of a serpent), brings about Ekundayo's transformation into a human being. These otherworldly events set the stage for the nyama's subsequent journey from the captain's South Carolina home to a Virginia plantation, where, with the help of the god Amma, Ekundayo comes to rest within Nat, a slave in love with his master's daughter. Amma has explained to Ekundayo that "The chalk-faced Soul Stealers... have released forces they have no knowledge of... Their ignorance and cruelty threaten the very fabric of creation." The many captives' deaths have left the nyama "without a place to be," and Amma has entrusted Ekundayo with the job of figuring out how to give them a home. In an endnote Lester explains that some of the key elements of the tale derive from the Dogon religion, but readers will find Ekundayo's mission powerful even without that knowledge. All the characters here are fully formed, from Nat's father, with a hate so strong he becomes as violent as his oppressors, to the slave master plagued by guilt and his own forbidden love. Ultimately, this is a novel of healing, and a seeming culmination of Lester's scholarship and faith in humanity. Not to be missed. Ages 12-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 9 Up-More than a picture of slavery through the eyes of those enslaved or their captors, Lester's narrative evokes spiritual images of Mali's Dogon people. The story begins in Africa where the nyama, or life force, of a murdered spiritual leader is carried to America on a slave ship as a "seed" passed to his daughter through a kiss. The seed springs forth through the help of Lebe, the serpent, into the form of a young man, Ekundayo, whose mission is to bring peace to the growing numbers of spirits swarming chaotically over this new land. The creator god, in the form of a big bird, transports Ekundayo to Virginia in the body of a slave, Nathaniel, who secretly loves his master's daughter, Ellen, whom he's known since childhood and who taught him to read and write. As Nathaniel, Ekundayo learns the stories and tribulations of the slaves. He struggles to discover how he can bring peace to the dead he "sees" as gray fog hovering over the slave quarters. On the eve of the Civil War, Nathaniel/Ekundayo has visions of the dead who tell him the future as well as the past and he sets a course that will carry on for generations. This is a powerful novel for mature readers. It is fraught with sorrow, brutality, triumph, and joy. In the end, Lester projects hope that lost souls and forbidden relationships can find peace, acceptance, and happiness.-Kathy Lehman, Thomas Dale High School Library, Chester, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Ekundayo is a spirit inside an African woman on a slave ship coming to America. Taking the body of a slave named Nat, Ekundayo pursues the work given to him by Amma, the creator god: to bring peace to the nyama, the souls of the dead. But the brutality of the slave trade and of slavery in America creates so many nyama it is difficult for Ekundayo to know how to heal the wounds. Drawing on his research into the Dogon religion of Mali, Lester has created a rich, complex and rewarding novel. Though confusing in the early going, the epic tale becomes the drama of family lines through American history, a love story interrupted and a meditation on the importance of story, where Ekundayo realizes is the proper resting place for the dead. Dedicated to a white civil-rights worker, this is a tribute to those who "act in ways history does not condone and, by doing so, begin to change that history." (author's note) (Fiction. YA)

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