During the Antebellum Era, slave narratives were prominent historical sources that gave great insight to the first-hand experience of slaves in America. As they signified to white America the true horrors and exploitation of the institution of slavery from the witness accounts of enslaved African Americans who actually experienced it. In the narratives, the enslaved stressed the horrors of slavery through their various life experiences in the south with their slaveholders and their great will to escape their bondage. Thus, demonstrating the immorality of such an institution to their intended audience of white America in order to not only tell their story but move their audience to see the demeaning and inhumane institution for what it is to hopefully abolish it. Through Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and the story of Harriet Jacobs documented in the documentary Slavery in the Making of America’s “Seeds of Destruction,” their struggles reveal the horror and triumph of surviving and escaping such…
The book Copper Sun by Sharon Draper is a book about an enslaved girl named Amari. Amari is a girl in a small village who gets enslaved and took on a ship full of slaves. Amaris ex boyfriend that she still cares about gets beat on the ship right in front of her eyes which hurt her inside. Many of other girls were raped but Amari made friends with a guy that works on the ship and she thought she was going to be raped but he vented to her about his feelings and even taught her some english which made Amari happy.…
The book Copper Sun by Sharon Draper is an interesting story about Amari’s journey as slave girl. This story starts in Africa, Amari’s homeland. Amari was captured by slave traders and sent on a ship to America. She has now found herself on a plantation. In the novel, there are many differences and similarities between the ship and the plantation.…
I read the book " Family". It tells of the truth of what the slaves have to endure . Also, how the slaves were able to get out of the indignity and overcome the racist to make better life for themselves. The two characters from the novel such as Always and Loretta. These are the two character has show how they move forward to a better life.…
Initial Reaction Amari met glory once she arrived to Fort Mose after the long painful adventure. For the rest of the journey, the trio met this woman named Fiona O’Reilly who had slaves herself too. They met her because they decided to sleep in a unknown shed. Luckily, she did not harm them or sold them out. She helped them by giving them food, clothes, and a wagon along with a horse.…
There is a common accepted historical narrative that portrays the antebellum era as one fraught with prominent, white figures who owned slaves who were subservient and complacent. This commonly accepted notion of what slavery was like depicts slaves as individuals who simply accepted their fate and did not opt to exercise any form of agency. This notion that slaves did not try to actively resist the confines of slavery is untrue and is illustrated by the work Kindred by Octavia Butler, Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps, and Django Unchained directed by Quentin Tarantino. These creative works of historical fiction do accurately represent how slaves were treated but also, perhaps more important how slaves resisted such unjust treatment. The three aforementioned pieces were all created at different period of time.…
If you can, imagine yourself as a fifteen year old girl who has just witnessed her family’s murder, and has been taken away from her village to be sold to the highest bidder. Her name is Amari, and she was living happily in a village in Africa with her family. She was about to get married to a man named Besa that she loved a lot. Until one day everything had changed for the worse! Her tribe was visited by strange white men, who Amari honestly thought shouldn’t be there, she wasn’t wrong!…
Patrick Bauer 11/9/15 HIST-105-519 Harriet Jacobs Essay In the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Jacobs’ tells of the many trails and hard experiences that the average slave goes through from day to day. From malicious punishments to extreme acts of hatred we see the treatment that African-Americans were subject to as they spent their lives in servitude to the slaveholders. These actions of the southern slaveholders are personified in this book by the first person account of Jacobs’ as the slave-girl Linda who she uses to help us better understand and imagine the hardships that she and other slaves had to fight through.…
In Lose Your Mother by Saidya Hartman, Hartman gives the reader a unique perspective on the institution of slavery than is often examined. This work begins to question our previous knowledge of the slave trade and forces us to look at the story from a perspective that as a society we may not want to acknowledge. Her work demands a deeper understanding of the institution of slavery be known and no longer allows society to perpetuate the misunderstandings of slavery and Africa that we have been perpetuating since the trade started. Often we are taught slavery from a Western perspective; we discuss how America prospered from the industry and how devastating the institution treated the individuals it captured.…
In the south, slaves worked in bad conditions, were often beaten by their masters, and their families were often mercilessly separated. Such maltreatment is illustrated in the story of Pauli Murray’s great-grandmother Harriet. Being a slave in the Smith family, Harriet had no choice but to follow the orders of the family members, and because of this, she was victimized by Sidney Smith. Even though Harriet was married to Reuben Day, a free black, for two years, Sidney could still force Reuben to leave her or that he will be “whipped and thrown in jail”, and after that, Sidney would always “beat [Harriet] into submission” and rape her (Murray 42-43). After the American Revolution, northerners have already begun to rethink about their attitude towards slavery.…
Cally Welsh Hour 5 Copper Sun Analysis Essay “She looked at the faces in the sea of pink-skinned people who stood around pointing at the captives and jabbering their language as each of the slaves was described,” (Draper, 72). The feeling of Amari being forced to be a slave was heartbreaking. Throughout the novel Copper Sun, Amari the main character shows how strong she was. Even though she was taken from her family and forced into slavery, Amari always stuck through it. Amari showed strength through her thoughts, words, and actions.…
She embodies the struggles that all enslaved women have to endure. First, she is forced to maintain her rate of five hundred pounds of cotton every day or be punished while most men are unable to pick a mere three hundred pounds. Second, she is victimized by both her master and mistress. The master assaults her sexually and mercilessly. On the other hand, the mistress, instead of sympathizing with her plight as a fellow woman, subjects her to physical and psychological abuse (Stevenson 1).…
Our history books don’t teach us much about the slave’s perspective on slavery, only the white man’s point of view. They don’t seem to go into detail about how their culture was broken when taken from their homeland, and forced to forget their sacred traditions that were passed on to them generation after generation. A Woman Named Solitude does just that. This inspiring story follows a young girl named Solitude as she tries her hardest to overcome the challenges slavery puts in front of her. André Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude is a striking tale about how slavery can affect the inner self.…
Copper Sun, was written by Sharon M. Draper. It tells about an African female named Amari and Draper uses a lot of different ways to get people into the story. She uses a lot of emotion in her book, and two of the strongest emotions are fear and affection. Amari feels tons of fear throughout the entire novel. The part where she experiences fear the most is when her village is being attacked.…
If you have ever had to go through a time when the struggle just never seemed to end, you know that it changed you as a person and helped you grow to be much more strong and mature. In the novel Chains, the author, Laurie Halse Anderson, presents a historical fiction novel where a young girl named Isabel, overcomes many hardships in her life as a slave in the late 1700’s. She is sold away to the abusive Locktons, where she faces many challenges, including having her 5-year-old sister sold away and being branded on her cheek. Later on, Isabel proves that she is willing to do anything in order to gain freedom by siding with both of the countries and helping them, with the sole purpose of escaping her situation. Anderson demonstrates that through…