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Overview
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.
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
nonfiction, and poetry for children and adults. He lives 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"?