Slave Conversations - Poetic Reality

Slave Conversations: Poetic Reality is not a conventional poetry collection. It is a series of intimate, dramatic conversations — between enslaved men and women on a plantation, between generations separated by the Atlantic, between grandmothers and granddaughters trying to make sense of a world built to keep them down. Every voice in this book is a voice history tried to erase. Floyd Garvey gives them back their words.

The collection opens on a plantation, where Pedro and Nat speak in hushed, urgent tones about freedom — not as an abstract idea, but as a plan, a risk, a fire that keeps going out and keeps being relit. From there the conversations travel across time and geography: through the hold of a slave ship crossing the Atlantic, through the church where enslaved people were forced to worship a God handed to them by their oppressors, through the shacks where mothers rocked babies they knew could be taken in the night, through the boardrooms and courtrooms and neighborhoods of a supposedly free world that was built — and remains built — to ensure they never truly rise.

The characters are fictional, but the history is not. Pedro, Nat, Kunta, Abigail, Ruth, Betty, Sandy, Nairobi, Sam, John, Oliver, Shane, Asar and Kafu speak with the weight of millions behind them. Their conversations cover the weaponization of religion against enslaved Africans, the deliberate erasure of African identity and culture, the trans-Atlantic journey and the diaspora divisions it created, the brutality of the overseer system — Black men forced to police and punish their own people — the theft of African children, the systematic destruction of prosperous Black communities like Rosewood and Greenwood in Tulsa, and the quiet, grinding persistence of systemic racism into the present day.
But Slave Conversations is not only a book of sorrow. It is a book of fire. It closes with a call — rooted in the words of Marcus Garvey, echoing through the voices of Asar and Kafu — to reclaim African identity, to shed the slave master's name, to end the relationship with the oppressor and build something entirely our own. Up, up ye mighty race, accomplish what you will, rise and take your place.

This book is for every reader who has felt that their history was a footnote in someone else's story. For everyone who grew up with questions that the classroom never answered. For everyone who has carried the weight of a name that was never theirs. Slave Conversations: Poetic Reality does not ask for permission to tell the truth. It simply tells it — in verse, in dialogue, in the voices of those who lived it — and trusts the reader to be ready.

Published June 2024 · Sands of Time Publishers · Toronto
ISBN: 978-1-7383280-0-0
Available in print and digital formats worldwide.