The inspiration for Eleanor Shearer’s debut was a footnote in an exhibition about emancipation. It described how the children of enslaved women in the Caribbean were stolen and sold. On liberation, many mothers went in search of their fractured families.
River Sing Me Home opens in Barbados in 1834. The British have decreed an end to slavery but in reality little has changed; the enslaved people on the plantation will become “apprentices” for the next six years. “Freedom was just another name for the life they had always lived.” Desperate to find her five surviving children, Rachel flees.
