A view from the hold

—and meeting Barry Jenkins' gaze

Sometime last summer, I stumbled across Harold Courlander’s 1967 book The African. It’s a slow, careful accounting of a young boy snatched from his homeland off the coast of West Africa and transported across the Atlantic, first to French-controlled St. Lucia and then to Georgia. Alex Haley later used Courlander’s story to develop his book, Roots.

In th…