Fortune's Bones

The Manumission Requiem

By Nelson, Marilyn

Publishers Summary:
There is a skeleton on display in the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut. It has been in the town for over 200 years. Over time, the bones became the subject of stories and speculation in Waterbury. In 1996 a group of community-based volunteers, working in collaboration with the museum staff, discovered that the bones were those of a slave named Fortune who had been owned by a local doctor. After Fortune's death, the doctor dissected the body, rendered the bones, and assembled the skeleton. A great deal is still not known about Fortune, but it is known that he was baptized, was married, and had four children. He died at about the age of 60, sometime after 1797. Marilyn Nelson was commissioned by the Mattatuck Museum and received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts to write a poem in commemoration of Fortune's life. The Manumission Requiem is that poem. Detailed notes and archival materials provide contextual information to enhance the reader's appreciation of the poem.

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ISBN
978-1-93242-512-3
Publisher
Front Street


REVIEWS

Horn Book Magazine

Reviewed on January 1, 2005

Marilyn Nelson's liturgical re-membrance pieces together the macabre story of an enslaved man in eighteenth-century Connecticut. After sixty years of literally back-breaking labor for his master, the "bonesetter" Dr. Porter, Fortune was pressed into postmortem service as an anatomical specimen, an instructional tool, and studied by Porter and four succeeding generations of physicians for more than two hundred years. In 1933, his skeleton was donated to the Mattatuck Muse...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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