When I share books about enslavement with students, some state that they would have revolted or escaped if enslaved. Those options were not the only acts of resistance waged by enslaved people.

In my verse novel, KIN: ROOTED IN HOPE, illustrated by my son Jeffery Boston Weatherford, we trace our lineage from colonial America to the all-Black, Reconstruction-era villages of Unionville and Copperville that our forebears cofounded. This poem imagines how my ancestor, Prissy Copper, might have resisted while a house servant at Maryland’s Wye House plantation.