The Remains of the Slave Narrative in Marilyn Nelson’s Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem

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Marilyn Nelson’s volume of poems, Fortune’s Bones: A Manumission Requiem (2004), was commissioned to commemorate Fortune, a Connecticut slave who died in 1798. His master, a doctor, dissected him in order to use his skeleton for anatomical study. Until scientists and historians identified the skeleton as Fortune’s, it was an anonymous exhibit in Connecticut’s Mattatuck museum. Much of what was discovered about the slave’s life is told through the book’s “paratexts”—the copious notes and images that accompany the poems. Through the paratexts, and through various motifs appearing in the poems, Nelson’s book evokes the slave narrative, but it appropriates elements of an outmoded form to say something new. Rejecting the suspense and linearity of the slave narratives, the poems imitate the form of the requiem mass. They also mock the empirical epistemology of the slave narratives, downplaying the slave’s material existence in order to endorse the spiritual life. Like Beloved, Nelson’s book moves beyond the slavery period to deal with the problem of surviving history’s traumas. This contemporary African American requiem can be seen as a kind of ritual exorcism designed to liberate readers from the horror of the past and put Fortune’s story to rest.