Ketty KAMANZI
Section 19
November 8, 2015
In Search of The Promised Land
In Search of The Promised Land is a book that follows the lives of the Thomas-Rapier family, a slave-ish family in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is able to depict the experiences of the family and showcase the “slavery situation” in the antebellum and Civil War era. With increasing tension between whites and blacks, major gray areas between freedom and slavery, varying opinions on slavery from the North and the South; In Search of the Promised Land gives an idea of how life as an African-American at that time.
Sally Thomas, the matriarch of the Thomas-Rapier family, was owned by the Thomas family. She was moved from Virginia to Nashville, Tennessee where …show more content…
James and John Rapier Jr. traveled to Nicaragua. They soon discovered that the lives of free blacks were not good ones. There was poverty and “two-thirds of the deaths were from infection, diarrhea, dysentery, or malignant fevers” (122). Due to this, John viewed slavery as better than freedom seeing as it gave better manners of life. James returned to Nashville after a short while because instead of the safe haven he was looking for, he “witnessed only death and destruction” (124). John, on the other hand, traveled around the Caribbeans and the U.S. He traveled to Haiti and then Jamaica where he attended medical school and acted as an Army doctor in the Civil War. James Rapier, however, went up north to Buxton, Canada which was “the most successful black utopian experiment in the Americas” (142). In Buxton, James was able to find his promised land and live a free life. The U.S. and the other regions of America at that time were in different situations. The U.S. was stuck in a tug-of-war between freedom and slavery and plagued by hatred and racism. Canada, or maybe just Buxton, was less segregated and more open to African-Americans. In South and Central America, disease and poverty were the cost of
Section 19
November 8, 2015
In Search of The Promised Land
In Search of The Promised Land is a book that follows the lives of the Thomas-Rapier family, a slave-ish family in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is able to depict the experiences of the family and showcase the “slavery situation” in the antebellum and Civil War era. With increasing tension between whites and blacks, major gray areas between freedom and slavery, varying opinions on slavery from the North and the South; In Search of the Promised Land gives an idea of how life as an African-American at that time.
Sally Thomas, the matriarch of the Thomas-Rapier family, was owned by the Thomas family. She was moved from Virginia to Nashville, Tennessee where …show more content…
James and John Rapier Jr. traveled to Nicaragua. They soon discovered that the lives of free blacks were not good ones. There was poverty and “two-thirds of the deaths were from infection, diarrhea, dysentery, or malignant fevers” (122). Due to this, John viewed slavery as better than freedom seeing as it gave better manners of life. James returned to Nashville after a short while because instead of the safe haven he was looking for, he “witnessed only death and destruction” (124). John, on the other hand, traveled around the Caribbeans and the U.S. He traveled to Haiti and then Jamaica where he attended medical school and acted as an Army doctor in the Civil War. James Rapier, however, went up north to Buxton, Canada which was “the most successful black utopian experiment in the Americas” (142). In Buxton, James was able to find his promised land and live a free life. The U.S. and the other regions of America at that time were in different situations. The U.S. was stuck in a tug-of-war between freedom and slavery and plagued by hatred and racism. Canada, or maybe just Buxton, was less segregated and more open to African-Americans. In South and Central America, disease and poverty were the cost of