Gaspar’s Home: The Great Dismal Swamp
Gaspar’s Home: The Great Dismal Swamp
Gaspar’s Home follows Gaspar, a self-emancipated maroon and community leader in the Great Dismal Swamp. Though a former bandit who raided plantations, he lives a peaceful life with his family until enslavers capture his son, Ezekiel, and threaten him with torture and selling him away. Will Gaspar be able to use his skills as a former bandit to save his son? This graphic novel focuses on the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast swamp in Virginia and North Carolina where formerly enslaved people, known as maroons, could find refuge and live in their own autonomous communities with diverse cultures. Gaspar’s Home shows the courage, perseverance, and resilience it takes to seize and protect one’s freedom. After reading this book, you will know how maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp used the landscape itself as both shield and sustenance, building autonomous communities that challenged the slave system and redefined what freedom could mean.
Details
28-page book
1 historian interview
15 workbook questions
For grades 7-12
