Wake review: a must-read graphic history of women-led slave revolts

One especially bitter truth about the capture and enslavement of Africans brought to the New World is this: the identities of those who profited from it and those structures that upheld it were designed to be unremarkable.

Related: Secret history: the warrior women who fought their enslavers

One of the first books to break through this fiction was the 1981 book There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. Written by Vincent Harding, a historian, activist and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr, the book helped shatter the myth of the docile, happy slave described by slaveowners, including Thomas Jefferson (in quotes you’ll never find in Hamilton).

Enslaved Black people did resist. They ran, and they often died rather than be kept captive.

Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s graphic book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, embraces a more significant, more authentic history of resistance. It highlights the deep, unhealed, intergenerational pain of rape, torture and death that was the lot of untold women.

Hall has offered up this ancestral pain and used it as a lens through which we might attend to those previously rendered invisible. The book’s unmistakable and unapologetic power is amplified by Martínez, a New Orleans-based graphic artist and illustrator. His artwork is reminiscent of woodblock, with all the energy of a superhero comic. His work evokes multiple symbols. Slave ships power through waves that look like both water and flames. They are an excellent accompaniment to Hall’s stories within the story.

Hall, a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, combines a narrative of her own family life and ancestors with the sometimes-maddening search for enslaved women who died rather than be kept captive. The resulting story is part autobiography, part Forensic Files. When all is said and done, Hall has tracked the evidence of crimes against humanity.

First and foremost, she confesses she is haunted: “Sometimes when you think you’re hunting down the past … The past is hunting you. I was born to tell the stories.”

Walking the streets of New York City, she describes what it is like to live in the wake of slavery – which is, in fact, all around us. As a tenants’ rights lawyer, she was immersed in the consistent injustices rooted in racism, encoded in everything she touched. This reality sent her back to school to earn her PhD in history, focusing on race and gender in America.

At the very start, she wonders where she might find those foremothers who have resisted, and it’s this question that keeps her traveling, away from her wife and son. She burrows into archives half a world away, in London and Liverpool, through obscure histories of colonial governments, in search not only of what was written but those things alluded to and sometimes obscured by the historical record.

Hall alternates the facts of her search with a carefully imagined narrative of Black women who did all they could to disrupt systems of enslavement. Sometimes she must imagine their names. Sometimes she must imagine their fate.

But Hall is not writing some careless fable. “I must read the documents against the grain,” she writes, “assuming there are any documents to be found at all.”

The search is not without incident. An aborted visit to the headquarters of Lloyd’s of London should shame it for generations – a reckoning for the institution (and its records) is only a matter of time. Yet what she cannot find in private archives she painstakingly uncovers in public records brought to light by computers.

She credits the banding together of a group of historians who have long searched the archives for the outlines of the transatlantic slave trade: “By the 1990s, some historians started using new digital technologies and began pooling their resources. Quantitative historians, who use statistical tools to study big-picture historical trends, created a vast database of research on over 36,000 slave ship voyages that took place over 400 years.”

At least one in 10 voyages was disrupted by revolt. This doesn’t sound like many until one considers that for centuries no one believed these captives were capable of revolt at all. Quantitative historians could not figure out why some ships were the site of revolts, and others were not, save for a single fact: “The more women on board a slave ship, the more likely a revolt.”

It became clear that historians’ bias against the resistance of women colored their conclusions. But Hall was not troubled by this myopia, and in examining records in London she tracked reasons women were likely to rebel. Chief among them was opportunity.

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Women or girls were placed on the quarterdeck, near the ship’s weapons. Men were below in chains. The enslavers had no reason to believe women would fight, since their views of womanhood were more likely influenced by women in their own lives, bound by a culture of propriety. Of course, there were more sinister reasons. Keeping the women unchained and accessible meant they were more vulnerable to sexual abuse.

Following the trail of a slave ship, the Unity, Hall connects the ironic dots from the ship’s name to the primary goal of Black history: a way of uniting people of African descent. The book’s very title makes an additional connection between the literal and figurative turbulence following slave ships and ceremonies following death.

“Like at a wake,” Hall writes, “a wake as in a funeral, we speak of the dead and for the dead. At this wake, we must defend the dead. Our memories must be longer than our lifetimes.”

Hall has written, and Martínez has illustrated, an inspired and inspiring defense of heroic women whose struggles could be fuel for a more just future.

• Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts is published in the US by Simon & Schuster and in the UK by Penguin. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply