The spread shows Hall, at the bottom right, walking through an empty Grand Central Station as she narrates, “We are haunted. The next panel, a two-page spread, highlights this very fact. Even though progression has occurred, the residual effects of slavery carry on to the core of the nation. Hall, overlooking New York, is the dream of the ancestors that stand behind her.

The only words on the page, apart from the title which references Zap Mama’s 2004 album of the same name, are a quote from Maya Angelou: “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.” The seven Black women, like Hall, stare out at the skyline, looking in various directions as they examine the city that has arisen over time. Behind her, we see the enslaved women whose stories she tells over the course of Wake.

The large panel zooms out some and shows Hall, with the same pose as the previous panel, gazing out of the city. Here, we see Hall gazing at the city where she grew up, the city that she speaks about in chapter 1, saying that even though she grew up in New York she never heard the full history of the city, the role that the enslaved men, women, and children played in its foundation.

The three panels at the top zoom in from the New York skyline in the first panel to the Empire State Building in the second panel to Hall standing on one of the eagle gargoyles on the building as she looks out at the city in the third panel. The opening page of chapter 10 contains four panels, three small panels on the top and a larger panel on the bottom. Entitled “Ancestry in Progress,” the final chapter brings together the threads that Hall and Martínez weave throughout the text, and as I have discussed previously, they do this in a masterful manner that showcases the powerful manner in which graphic novels work to engage us as readers not just with the direct narrative of a text but also with the themes and ideas that course through the text’s veins. Today, I want to conclude this series by looking at some of the panels in the last chapter of Wake. Over the last couple of posts, I’ve been looking at Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts.

Rebecca hall wake