Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Amos Fortune, Free Man, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom and Slavery
Dignity and Racism
Hard Work and Good Character
Providence and Faith
Summary
Analysis
The first summer they live in Jaffrey, Amos, Violet, and Celyndia all work so hard to establish the new tannery that Violet pauses her own livelihood of weaving. When Celyndia has completed her daily chores, she runs up the hill to play and roam with the other village children. Amos frequently reminds her that she has as much of a right to roam freely as they, but he also teaches her that she should share her blessings—like the baskets of wild berries she collects—with others.
As the Fortune family establishes itself in Jaffrey, Amos teaches his adoptive daughter about the importance of generosity and that hard work earns a person his or her right to participate in the community. And while this is a standard American message, it’s also important to remember that the white citizens of Jaffrey, for the most part, have freedom as a birthright, rather than something to work hard for. The specter of racism still lurks in the Fortunes’ world, even if people in Jaffrey welcome them more warmly than people in Woburn.
Themes
Tanning hides involves a lot of hard work, especially in Jaffrey, where Amos lacks some of the facilities (like a smokehouse) he had in Woburn. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t trade the hard work for the free, dignified life he now has. First, Amos soaks the skins for several days, then Violet scrapes off the hair, carefully collecting it to spin and weave later. Next, the skins soak in a water-lye mixture in a pit Amos has dug near the brook. When they run out of lye, they must make it from scratch. By midsummer, he has prepared the works and a yard for drying the hides in the sun, and business begins to flood in.
The book goes into detail about the hide tanning process. On one level, this simply confirms its ongoing claim that Amos Fortune is a hard-working, conscientious man and that his work ethic makes him a good citizen of his community. On another, readers may also interpret Amos’s trade as a metaphor for his story, in which a great deal of suffering and hard work transforms Amos Fortune, enslaved child, into Amos Fortune, free man.
Themes
By Amos’s second year in Jaffrey, business is good. He adds a second room to the cabin, and the payments from his customers begin to fill up the iron kettle where the Fortunes keep their cash. Amos wonders how long it will take him to save enough to buy his own land. While he knows, in his soul, that heaven is his ultimate home, he longs for a nicer place on earth, where Violet’s flowers might grow freely, she and Celyndia might have a house full of pretty things, and Cyclops might have a comfortable barn.
Amos’s story of hard work leading to success is a version of the foundational American myth that a person’s actions alone (rather than systemic factors like racism, sexism, wealth, or class) determine their success or failure in life. The book holds Amos’s life out as a model for how a good American should approach his or her life by actively working to bring about success. But Amos’s secret longings also point to the deeper truth that external forces sometimes constrain a person’s actions.
Themes
Customers who bring their hides to Amos often stay to chat and frequently leave envying his happiness. Only Violet knows that he nurses secret dreams within him. He’s solitary and somewhat secret, like Monadnock Mountain, with which he develops a close affinity. He can tell the weather by looking at the clouds around its peak. He teaches Celyndia the meaning of its name—“the Mountain that stands alone.”
When the book casts people as envying the Fortunes’ happiness, it continues to claim that systemic racism doesn’t exist in their world, even though all three were formerly enslaved by white families. Instead of rebelling against this foundational injustice, Amos aligns himself with the timeless, serene mountain. He sees—but doesn’t allow himself to be bothered by—the injustice around him.
Themes
Get the entire Amos Fortune, Free Man LitChart as a printable PDF.
Amos’s customers also respect his skills. Once, a young man brings a cowhide and tries to demand that Amos turn it into leather before the new year so the young man can use it for his wedding breeches. Amos insists that he will not—and cannot—rush the process. Even when the young man threatens to take his business elsewhere, Amos holds firm, because fine work takes time. And the young man yields.
The young man with the wedding leather also provides the book an opportunity to make a claim that racism is a personal, rather than systemic, issue. The white customer initially tries to bully the Black tanner—but Amos’s hard work wins the man over.
Themes
Amos takes the young man’s cowhide and puts it through the tanning process. First, he stretches it and scrapes away skin, hair, and the last vestiges of viscera and fat. Then he puts it with others in a vat of sulfuric acid which prepares the skins for the tanning process. This involves spending several months in pits of tanning liquid. Daily, Amos agitates the hides by stomping on them with heavy shoes, hauls them out to check their progress, and puts them back. Then, he dries them in the sun and softens them, either by beating them with a steel tool or by passing them through a set of woolen rollers. Fortunately, Amos finishes the young man’s cowhide before winter; during the cold months, he focuses on smaller, finer hides that require less time and physical labor in the freezing pits.
Just as it did earlier in the chapter, the book offers a thorough description of the labor-intensive tanning process. And again, in this instance, the information serves as a metaphorical framework to bolster the book’s claims about the inherent value of hard work and about the ways that hardship can soften and improve a person, making them a more valuable member of the community. In this vein, Amos’s decades of hard work in the tannery, first as an enslaved laborer and now as a free man, prove the strength and resilience of his character.
Themes
Amos works from sunset to sundown six days a week. But he dedicates Sundays to his family and his faith. He puts on fine velvet breeches instead of his trusty leather ones and wears his silver shoe buckles and fine hat. Then he, Violet, and Celyndia set off together for church, where they sit in the pew at the back reserved for Black people. Some of their Black neighbors live comfortably, but the big Burdoo family lives in poverty and need. Like everyone else, Amos loves listening to Parson Laban Ainsworth, whose weekday behavior aligns with the righteous words of his Sunday sermons.
Amos invests himself in the practice of his faith—not just attending church services, but also in living rightly and practicing charity—just as completely as he invests himself in his leather tanning trade. But despite all his hard work—and the respect it earns him in the community—he still faces racism and mistreatment at the hands of a society that considers Black people unworthy to join the rest of the white community in the church.
Themes
When Amos became an official member of the church in May of 1789, eight years after arriving in Jaffrey, some of the church elders regretted the fact that his being Black would limit his contributions to the community. Even if Amos had heard their doubts, he wouldn’t have cared, and he does contribute, in part by supporting the Burdoo family in the years after Moses Burdoo, Sr. dies, leaving behind a wife, Lois, and five children including Polly and Moses. But while Amos hopes to share his good fortune with Lois, Violet scorns the woman for her “inability to care for” her children or “rise above the [impoverished] conditions” in which they live.
But, even though the segregated seating at the church suggests an underlying systemic framework to the mistreatment of Amos and other Black people, the book works to deemphasize this truth by focusing on individual acts of racist behavior or thought, such as the church elders who worry that Amos won’t contribute as much to their community. But although subsequent events with the Burdoos will show that Amos does at least as much—if not more than—the rest of the community, he never confronts these men, nor does the book fully explore where they get their erroneous beliefs from.
Themes
When Amos, Violet, and Celyndia arrive on one typical Sunday visit, they find the Burdoo family gathered around their hearth, dolefully singing spirituals. The Fortunes announce their presence by joining in on the final chorus. The Burdoo children beg Amos to tell them a story about Africa, their voices chirping like eager birds; they love stories of Africa, because they associate the continent with heaven. As Amos tells his tale, the children huddle around, Violet’s eyes fill with tears of gratitude, and Lois’s eyes fill with tears of grief. 1000
Although neither the book nor the historical record makes it clear whether the Burdoo children were born free or not, their birdlike voices associate them with the yearning for freedom and the promise that freedom holds for a better future. The Burdoo children superimpose the idea of heaven on the idea of Africa, the land where their ancestors were born and lived their lives in freedom.
Themes
Once upon a time, Amos says, a traveler arrived in Africa and found “the natives” singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” around their fires. They explained to the traveler that another living near the Great Falls once put their dying chief and all his worldly goods into a canoe and set it in the river. As it floated downstream toward the falls, they sang this song to bid him farewell in strength, not sadness. When the canoe had nearly reached the brink of the falls, the tribe members saw their chief stand up in his canoe, reaching his arms toward the skies, and a chariot descended from heaven and bore their chief away. His story concluded, Amos leads the children in singing another spiritual, “Deep River.”
Amos tells the children a story based on a song that comes from the “spiritual” sub-genre of religious music. Like other spirituals, “Swing Low” acknowledges the fate of those in bondage either to enslavers or through poverty and teaches them to hope for a better life in the future. Much as Amos earlier used verses from the Christian Bible to articulate his noble status—and to keep a hold of his individuality in the face of the slave trade’s brutality—now he uses a hymn that draws on Christian beliefs to impose a proto-Christian worldview in Africa. This helps him to keep continuity between his present life and his past. But it also aligns with the book’s subtle yet insistent claim that enslavement, despite its abuses, benefitted its victims by “civilizing” them and introducing them to Christianity.
Themes
Finally, Amos sends the children outside while he and Violet talk with Lois. Life was hard for the Burdoos even when Moses, Sr. was alive, but it’s worse now, Lois confesses. She depends on charity, and members of the Jaffrey community are growing tired of supporting her. She fears that her children will be taken away from her. Amos offers to pay Moses and Lois’s other son a penny a day to work in his tannery. And he promises to care for Lois and her family.
The Burdoos seem like the formerly enslaved people Amos knew in Boston for whom freedom meant suffering and want. By waiting until his enslavers (whom the book portrays as essentially benevolent) saw fit to release him, the book implies that Amos saved himself the burden of freedom for which he wasn’t prepared. Regardless of Lois’s untold backstory, in the present moment she’s an example of ill-used freedom. And the book prescribes work as the antidote to what it perceives as Lois’s failure. This is why Amos offers Lois’s sons gainful employment.
Themes
At home that night, Violet hears Amos counting the family’s savings. She guesses his plan and makes her own, resolving to use the freedom Amos bought her from her former enslaver. The next day when Amos works the hides in the tanning pits, she buries the iron kettle with the family money in the woods where Amos can’t find it.
Violet herself benefitted from Amos’s unstinting generosity and willingness to engage in hard work. In choosing to protect her own interests when she suspects he wants to help the Burdoos financially, she practices her freedom, not just from the demands of white enslavers, but also to make her own choices.
Themes
