The Atlantic Sound

The Atlantic Sound is a 2000 travel book by Caryl Phillips. In the words of the Publishers Weekly review: "Journeys, as forces of spiritual and cultural transformation, bind this trio of nonfiction narratives, which explores the legacy of slavery in each of the three major points of the transatlantic slave trade."

Exploring what constitutes "home", Phillips repeats a journey he made as a child in the late 1950s on a banana boat from the Caribbean to Britain, then visits three cities pivotal to the African diaspora: Liverpool in England, developed through the transatlantic slave trade; Elmina on the coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the US south, where one-third of African Americans were landed and sold into bondage, and where Phillips makes a pilgrimage to Magnolia Cemetery to lay flowers at the grave of Julius Waties Waring, a white judge who played an important role in the early legal battles of the American Civil Rights Movement. Writing in The Guardian, reviewer Maya Jaggi notes: "It is characteristic of Phillips's vision that, in excavating the hidden history of this antebellum tourist centre, he draws imaginative links between diasporic wanderers and a white man whose moral stand made him an outcast in his own hometown."