Title: Echoes of the Drum West Africa → Charleston, South Carolina 1760 to 1865 Born into the proud Yoruba people of West Africa, Kofi was only 10 when he was captured and taken across the Atlantic in chains. His only inheritance: a carved wooden drum passed down through generations hidden in a cloth sack and miraculously kept with him during the brutal Middle Passage. In Charleston, enslaved on a rice plantation, Kofi is forbidden from speaking his native tongue, practicing his culture, or playing his drum. But late at night, under moonlight, he taps rhythms into the earth. Those rhythms whispers of rebellion, messages of hope echo through time. The story shifts between three timelines: Kofi in 1760s colonial South Carolina, preserving his heritage through rhythm. Amara, his great-great-granddaughter, who escapes to freedom via the Underground Railroad in the 1850s carrying a small carved drum on her journey north. Malik, a present-day high school student in Charleston who finds the drum buried in his grandmother’s backyard and unlocks generations of stories learning that resistance is part of his bloodline. Cultural preservation through music and memory.The African diaspora and generational resilience Identity, ancestry, and reclaiming lost roots