FOCUS, joint review--See also Lyons, Mary E., Letter from a Slave Girl With a searing combination of fact and fiction, two books set in the 1820s evoke what it was like to be a slave. Berry's docunovel begins in Africa, but most of it takes place on the plantations of the West Indies. Lyons sets her semifictionalized narrative in a North Carolina town. Both books focus on the individual experience, especially the enforced separation of parent and child by a system that views human beings as property. And in both stories the dream of escape is a sustaining vision.Ajeemah and his son Atu are kidnapped and sold in West Africa, never to see home or family again. After the bitter journey to Jamaica, they are separated forever, sold off to plantations 20 miles apart. Each sustains himself with memories of home, and each dreams of revenge and escape. The son's rebellion ends in heartbreak, flogging, suicide. The father is betrayed, but he survives to marry, sire a daughter, and celebrate when freedom comes. Like Berry's short story collection, A Thief in the Village BKL Ap 15 88, Ajeemah and His Son is rooted in his native Jamaica, even as it reaches out to universals. He's also a fine poet, and he tells his story with the rhythm, repetition, and lyricism of the oral tradition, tells the history as passionately as the personal account of capture, journey, sale, and toil. No reader or listener will forget the scene where Ajeemah begs his kidnappers to tell his family what's happened to him: his captors look at him as if he's mad, and we know he will never see his loved ones again. Berry dramatizes how a new slave is renamed and broken in; how relatives and tribespeople are purposely kept separate. We feel the savagery of the system that buys and sells human beings (He didn't belong to himself). Atu's story moves with inexorable tragedy: he nurses a young colt, trains it to full strength, dreams and schemes of riding away on its back, of getting revenge, of finding a ship. When the horse is confiscated by his owner, Atu breaks its legs and breaks himself.There's some overwriting at times: in the same paragraph Berry can slip from stirring poetry to rhetoric about horror, awe and dread, and terrible and awful get overused. The villain always seems to walk with a waddle, and there's a contrived plot element about some hidden gold. But there's no sentimentality. Even while he dramatizes the strong individual's power to transcend the plantation whips, Berry shows that the system kept most slaves subservient, all beaten down, gutted and trampled.The book ends with the joyful wedding of Ajeemah's daughter soon after emancipation. But the son's despairing end underlies all celebration. And Africa is lost. Lyons' story doesn't have the dramatic immediacy or the poetry of the Berry novel, perhaps because she uses too elaborate a frame. She tells the true story of the slave Harriet Jacobs in the form of fictionalized letters. Lyons imagines Harriet writing to her dead and distant loved ones, revealing her inner life, the thoughts and feelings that the slave system disregards. Her owner dies when Harriet is 11 years old, and she hopes to be set free; instead, she's bequeathed to a three-year-old white child, the daughter of the town doctor. Soon, the teenage slave has to fight off the sexual molestation of the doctor and the jealousy of his wife. Jacobs eventually has two children with another white man, but the continual threat of rape, of the auction block, and of separation from her children drives her into hiding. The doctor thinks she's fled north, but, in fact, she's hiding right there in town. For seven years she lives in a tiny garrett, cared for by her strong grandmother and watching her children through a chink in the wall. Lyons (who has written an acclaimed biography of Zora Neale Hurston, Sorrow's Kitchen BKL D 15 90) provides extensive background about the real Harriet Jacobs, who eventually escaped north and wrote one of the few female slave narratives. With a rich, unobtrusive idiom based on Jacobs' own writing, Lyons re-creates the voice of a southern black slave and personalizes her sorrow. (Reviewed Oct. 1, 1992)

In an authentic voice, Berry depicts the rage, confusion, and sadness that overcome Ajeemah and his son Atu as they are captured by slave traders and transported to Jamaica. Throughout the long and arduous journey, the two think about their families left behind and the freedom they have lost. In Jamaica, Ajeemah demands that his owner sees him as a human being. The powerful book will keep readers enthralled until the last word.

Ajeemah is taking his son Atu to be wed when they are seized by slavers and shipped to separate plantations in Jamaica. Refusing to accept that their freedom is permanently lost, both struggle to comprehend their misfortune; each finds a way to escape—Atu by killing himself, Ajeemah by raising a new family and surviving until slavery is outlawed decades later. Each moment here of the Jamaican-born poet's terse, melodious narrative is laden with emotion; even when Berry pauses to describe the slave trade, his island patois is rich and evocative, drawing readers irresistibly into Atu's shattered world and Ajeemah's profound grief for the life and children left behind. In the end, when Ajeemah celebrates his daughter's marriage, she admires his fortitude but—as a free Jamaican- -silently rejects her African name and heritage. Brilliant, complex, powerfully written. (Fiction. 12+)"

Gr 6 Up-- On their way to arrange 18-year-old Atu's wedding in 1807, the young man and his father, Ajeemah, are captured by slave traders and shipped in chains from their African village to the sugar-cane plantations of Jamaica. They are separated--Ajeemah to work in a leather shop on one estate and Atu as a field hand on another. Ajeemah plots to rebel, but is be trayed. Atu commits suicide in despair when a horse that he has bought and cared for is taken from him. Ajeemah nearly goes mad with a vision of his son's death, until a Jamaican-born slave woman nurses him back to health. The two marry and survive to see their daughter marry in freedom. Told in a matter-of-fact manner, this historical novel has the realism, tone, and poignancy of a family story, poetic in its very spareness. Berry contrasts the men's fluid expression in their native language with their halting ``plantation English,'' and he beautifully captures the roots of the Caribbean dialect. Writing from an African perspective, the author conveys the differences between those slaves born in the New World and those brought from Africa; while his wife dreams of buying her freedom, Ajeemah refuses to pay money for that which was his by birth. Readers will comprehend the enormous grief experi enced by Ajeemah and Atu, but they will come away with a new sense of respect for those who maintained their dignity and humanity under the cruelest of circumstances. --Lyn Miller- Lachmann, Siena College Library, Loudonville, NY