One of the thrills of the writing life is receiving pictures of one’s “babies” taken in faraway places. Bill Pinkney, the visionary behind the recreation of the Amistad schooner as a floating, living memorial to civil rights, presented a copy of Monuments, which tells Amistad’s story, to Josephine Kargbo of the Monuments and Relics Commission of Sierra Leone during the Amistad’s 2007-2008 Atlantic Freedom Tour. This historic 18-month journey retraced the slave trade route to

commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom in 2007, and in the United States in 2008. The Amistad’s arrival in Sierra Leone—the West African homeland of many of the Amistad captives—was a symbolic “homecoming” and the capstone event of the Atlantic Freedom Tour. Amistad’s epic voyage concluded on June 21, 2008 when she returned to New Haven to fanfare and rejoicing.