Venture Smith was born in Guinea, a prince of his father’s regional kingdom. Captured by slave traders at age six and brought to America, he worked for thirty years as a slave before buying his own and his family’s freedom, and then struggling to secure a future. His remarkable story is known to us today in part because Venture Smith told it in his time—his is considered the first slave narrative. Venture is the inspiration for Marilyn Nelson’s latest addition to her body of work illuminating African American experience. Her poems here reflect and extend the power of Venture’s own words. Venture’s narrative appears on the left hand side of each page spread, while an accompanying poem by Nelson, demanding reader’s further consideration of the pain, irony and cruelty of Venture’s story, is on the right. In a poem titled “How I Came By My Name,” opposite a section of narrative in which Venture reflects back on when he was still called Broteer, still in Africa, but already captured and being traded for rum and fabric, Nelson writes, “. . . Four casks of rum and a piece of cloth . . . The boy who was Borteer / disappeared. A business venture took his place. . . / Breath, dreams, pulse, traded for cloth and alcohol, / were capital . There was profit in the pain, / the chains. Venture. There were whole worlds to gain.” The words of this singular volume are set against somber abstract illustrations by Deborah Dancy. (Age 13 and older)

The true narrative of a slave from Africa, crafted in verse by Marilyn Nelson. Born an African prince, Broteer Furro was captured by slave traders at age six. As he stepped onto a cargo ship, the vessel's steward purchased the boy and gave him a new name: Venture. He landed in Rhode Island and worked through a lifetime of slavery to buy not only his own freedom but the freedom of his wife and children. Remarkable in his own time for his ambition and physical stature, Venture Smith became history's first man to document both his capture from Africa and life as an American slave. In this breathtaking volume, Marilyn Nelson's poems sit opposite the text of Smith's own narrative. Nelson's controlled verse layers this edition with insight into Smith's stoic eighteenth-century prose. Deborah Dancy's stark watercolor collages highlight the tension between the economical language of the narrative and the turbulent emotion within the poems.