Mama Day tells the story of the descendants of a black slave woman named Sapphira Wade and is focusing primarily on their heritage and identity. I believe, the author is omitting the spouses of the slave’s descendants from the family tree, because she focuses on the ancestral belonging and cultural heritage of Sapphira’s children and grandchildren only.
The novel starts with two documents, a family tree showing Sapphira Wade’s descendants and a bill of sell, which help frame the book within the history and black slavery. Naylor’s inclusion of the bill of sale gives the audience the first indication that the novel is a discourse on slavery. A segment of the bill of sale refers to “Sapphira is half prime, inflicted with sullenness and entertains a bilious nature, having resisted under reasonable chastisement the performance of field or domestic labour” (Naylor, p.2). The reader witnesses the power of the language to conceal the truth and hide the horrors of slavery.
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At first look we see ordinary women with extraordinary ability to change the lives of the people around them. Mama (Miranda) Day is a literal descendant of Sapphira and her spiritual reincarnation. She is the midwife, doctor and priestess to the people of Willow Springs. Mama Day is a person with strong convictions and true sense of the world around her. She is respected, loved deeply by the family and even feared by her community, because of her remedies and cures. Mama Day with her ability to heal and seer is a vivid example of her predecessor’s heritage and traditions, something that all inhabitants in Willow Spring cherish and treasure.
In conclusion, if the bill of sale represents a justification for black slavery, the story of Sappira Wade and her descendants counters this enslavement of black women, by presenting portraits of African-American women and their desire of freedom and
The novel covered so much that high school history textbooks never went into why America has never fully recovered from slavery and why systems of oppression still exists. After reading this novel, I understand why African Americans are still racially profiled and face prejudice that does not compare to any race living in America. The novel left a mixture of frustration and anger because it is difficult to comprehend how heartless people can be. This book has increased my interests in politics as well and increased my interest to care about what will affect my generation around the world. Even today, inmates in Texas prisons are still forced to work without compensation because peonage is only illegal for convicts. Blackmon successfully emerged the audience in the book by sharing what the book will be like in the introduction. It was a strange method since most would have expected for this novel to be a narrative, but nevertheless, the topic of post Civil War slavery has never been discussed before. The false façade of America being the land of the free and not confronting their errors is what leads to the American people to question their integrity of their own
The novel showed a pivotal point prior to the Civil War and how these issues ultimately led to the fueling of quarrel between Americans. While such institutions of slavery no longer exist in the United States, the message resonates with the struggles many groups ostracized today who continue to face prejudice from those in higher
Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later
It is well known that slavery was a horrible event in the history of the United States. However, what isn't as well known is the actual severity of slavery. The experiences of slave women presented by Angela Davis and the theories of black women presented by Patricia Hill Collins are evident in the life of Harriet Jacobs and show the severity of slavery for black women.
Altman, Linda Jacobs. Slavery and Abolition in American History. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 1999. Print.
Mama, as a member of an older generation, represents the suffering that has always been a part of this world. She spent her life coexisting with the struggle in some approximation to harmony. Mama knew the futility of trying to escape the pain inherent in living, she knew about "the darkness outside," but she challenged herself to survive proudly despite it all (419). Mama took on the pain in her family in order to strengthen herself as a support for those who could not cope with their own grief. Allowing her husband to cry for his dead brother gave her a strength and purpose that would have been hard to attain outside her family sphere. She was a poor black woman in Harlem, yet she was able to give her husband permission for weakness, a gift that he feared to ask for in others. She gave him the right to a secret, personal bitterness toward the white man that he could not show to anyone else. She allowed him to survive. She marveled at his strength, and acknowledged her part in it, "But if he hadn't had...
The practice of slavery for men and women both presented equally sufferings. However, the white planation owners or overseers routinely raped women during this time. Women regularly had their children stripped away from them and sold into slavery. However, ironica...
In Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the author subjects the reader to a dystopian slave narrative based on a true story of a woman’s struggle for self-identity, self-preservation and freedom. This non-fictional personal account chronicles the journey of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) life of servitude and degradation in the state of North Carolina to the shackle-free promise land of liberty in the North. The reoccurring theme throughout that I strive to exploit is how the women’s sphere, known as the Cult of True Womanhood (Domesticity), is a corrupt concept that is full of white bias and privilege that has been compromised by the harsh oppression of slavery’s racial barrier. Women and the female race are falling for man’s
One of the ways that enslaved men and women retained their dignity during slavery is their resistance against their owners; covertly and overtly. Stephanie M. H. Camp’s book, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, emphasized the way slaves, particularly enslaved women, expressed their own unique forms of resistance. Often, researchers neglect to delve into other forms of resistance aside from obvious ones such as running away or rebellion. Camp utilizes slave narratives and interviews, papers and journals to scrutinize covert forms of resistance that enslaved women had done in the antebellum south. This is shown when she explains how slaves express, using Edward Said’s term, “rival geography” in which they utilize their knowledge and proper usage within and around the plantation space; thus, challenging the control of space, time and movement of southern plantation owners through movement of bodies, objects, and information (Camp 7).
The dichotomy between those that are enslaved and those that are free is a very narrow one indeed. Arguably, the distance between the two is spanned only by an individual’s capacity to realize his innate humanity. For example, a slave that has only known the taste of the whip and the bite of shackles may be more in touch with his humanity than a poor, free man who has reached the pit of human degradation. Likewise an enterprising individual never encumbered by woes of abolition could possibly have a greater understanding of the value of life than a lowly slave. In 1859, Harriet E. Wilson attempts to explore this concept in her work entitled, Our Nig, or the Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. As the title proclaims, Our Nig is an account of the life of Frado, a free-born mulatto girl, who is abandoned by her mother and left to a life of servitude. The irony that is Frado’s life lies in the reality that while she is a free black living in the North, her lifestyle seems to closely resemble that of her enslaved counterparts in the South. In retrospect, however, many Southern slaves were able to appreciate elements of freedom, both mental and physical, that Frado, a free black, was never allotted.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth-century, notions of freedom for Black slaves and White women were distinctively different than they are now. Slavery was a form of exploitation of black slaves, whom through enslavement, lost their humanity and freedom, and were subjected to dehumanizing conditions. African women and men were often mistreated through similar ways, especially when induced to labor, they would eventually become a genderless individual in the sight of the master. Despite being considered “genderless” for labor, female slaves suddenly became women who endured sexual violence. Although a white woman was superior to the slaves, she had little power over the household, and was restricted to perform additional actions without the consent of their husbands. The enslaved women’s notion to conceive freedom was different, yet similar to the way enslaved men and white women conceived freedom. Black women during slavery fought to resist oppression in order to gain their freedom by running away, rebel against the slaveholders, or by slowing down work. Although that didn’t guarantee them absolute freedom from slavery, it helped them preserve the autonomy and a bare minimum of their human rights that otherwise, would’ve been taken away from them. Black
In From Slavery to Freedom (2007), it was said that “the transition from slavery to freedom represents one of the major themes in the history of African Diaspora in the Americas” (para. 1). African American history plays an important role in American history not only because the Civil Rights Movement, but because of the strength and courage of Afro-Americans struggling to live a good life in America. Afro-Americans have been present in this country since the early 1600’s, and have been making history since. We as Americans have studied American history all throughout school, and took one Month out of the year to studied African American history. Of course we learn some things about the important people and events in African American history, but some of the most important things remain untold which will take more than a month to learn about.
To understand the desperation of wanting to obtain freedom at any cost, it is necessary to take a look into what the conditions and lives were like of slaves. It is no secret that African-American slaves received cruel and inhumane treatment. Although she wrote of the horrific afflictions experienced by slaves, Linda Brent said, “No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." The life of a slave was never a satisfactory one, but it all depended on the plantation that one lived on and the mast...
Hunter-Willis, Miya. Writing the Wrongs: A Comparison of Two Female Slave Narratives. Diss. Marshall University, 2008. Dissertations & Theses: Full Text, ProQuest. Web. 22 Sep. 2011.
Northup, Solomon, Sue L. Eakin, and Joseph Logsdon. Twelve years a slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Print.