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Positive view of black history: In chapter 30, Lucille Delany says, "Instead of forgetting the past, I would have [our people] hold in everlasting remembrance our great deliverance." Historian David W. Blight quotes this as an example for Harper's work "to forge a positive view of black history", an aim she shared with... |
"Iola Leroy" "may well have [been] influenced" by Harriet Jacobs's 1861 autobiography "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl". |
The novel was "awarded more blame than praise" by literary critics, but "initial readers responded positively", causing the novel to be reprinted until 1895. From then on, however, it was not re-published until 1971. |
"Iola Leroy" was for some time cited as the first novel written by an African-American woman. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s 1982 discovery of Harriet Wilson's "Our Nig" (1859) displaced it from that spot. Still, it remains important as "the first black vision of black women's roles in reshaping post-Civil War Amer... |
The African-American journalist Ida B. Wells took up the pen name "Iola" when she first started writing articles about racism in the South. |
According to J. F. Yellin, "Iola Leroy" "helped shape the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and other foremothers of black women writing today." |
Sing, Unburied, Sing is a novel by American author Jesmyn Ward and published by Scribner in 2017. It is about a family's dynamics in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The novel received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was named by "The New York Times" as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017. |
Ward's third novel, "Sing, Unburied, Sing" was published on September 5, 2017, by Scribner. |
Joseph (Jojo) is one of the main characters, and also one of the three narrators of the book. He is the child of Michael who is White, and Leonie, who is Black. The story starts on his thirteenth birthday at his maternal grandparents' house in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Jojo throughout the book is often acting like the... |
Leonie is the daughter of River and Philomene, and mother to Jojo and Kayla. She is one of the three narrators of the story. Leonie got pregnant at a young age, not certain of wanting to be a mother, since then she has been a mentally absent mother who focused mostly on her love for Michael. Leonie becomes a drug addic... |
River (Pop) is Jojo's and Kayla's maternal grandfather. He is the Father to Leonie and Given. He is the main parental figure in Jojo's life, which makes him the role model JoJo looks up to. He is quietly dignified and capable. Pop spent some time in Parchman prison when he was young and developed a "care giver" relatio... |
Philomene (Mam) is Jojo and Kayla's maternal grandmother. She is the mother to Leonie and Given. She comes from a long line of women who have been able to heal and communicate with dead people. Mam steps up to look after Jojo and Kayla when she realizes Leonie does not care enough about her children. Mam is sick with c... |
Misty who is Leonie's white friend from work. Misty and Leonie are bound to each other by their drug addiction. Misty joins Leonie on the road trip to Parchman to pick up Michael after his release. |
Michael is Leonie's boyfriend and the father of Jojo and Kayla. He is white and comes from a racist family that doesn’t accept his relationship with Leonie or their kids. Michael, however, is not racist. At the beginning of the novel, he is in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, for drug tr... |
Michaela (Kayla) is Jojo's three-year-old little sister. She interacts with Jojo as a parental figure and prefers him to her mother, Leonie. Kayla, like Jojo, is able to see ghosts. Kayla is given the final word of "shh" to her brother. Kayla is emblematic of the future. Through Kayla's voice in the final scene, Ward e... |
Given is Leonie's older brother who was shot on a hunting trip by Michael's cousin when he was a senior in high school. Leonie sees Given's ghost throughout the novel, especially after she uses drugs. It is not until the second to last chapter when Given's ghost is freed, and Leonie does not see him anymore. |
Richie knows River from their time spent together in Parchman. He was placed in Parchman at twelve years old for stealing food for his nine siblings. He tried to escape later with an inmate named Blue and both were killed. His ghost follows JoJo back to Pop after JoJo arrives to pick up his father from Parchman because... |
Big Joseph is Michael's father. He does not have a healthy relationship with his son and the rest of the family because Michael decided to be in a relationship with Leonie, an African-American woman. Big Joseph was present at the trial for his nephew shooting Leonie’s brother prior to her and Michael’s relationship whi... |
Maggie is Michael's mother. She, also, does not have a healthy relationship with her son. Unlike her husband, she is seen wanting to make an effort with her son. She inhospitably welcomes Michael, Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla into their home, in an effort to salvage her relationship with her son. |
The next day, Leonie argues with Pop about whether she should take Jojo and Kayla with her on the trip. At Mam's suggestion, she invites her coworker Misty, whose boyfriend is also in Parchman. While she talks to her mom, Leonie realizes that Mam's cancer is getting worse. |
The next chapter is narrated by Richie. He recognizes Jojo as Pop's child. He recalls how Pop protected him while they were in Parchman. No one in the car but Jojo and Kayla can see Richie. |
On the drive back, they are pulled over by a police officer. There is no time to hide the meth Al gave them, so Leonie swallows it. Leonie, without thinking, tells the officer that they are coming back from Parchman. The officer handcuffs Leonie. He also handcuffs Michael. Jojo walks out of the car with Michael and the... |
Back in the car, Leonie, who is high from the meth she swallowed, becomes sick. Michael pulls over at a gas station and gives Jojo money to buy milk and charcoal. Leonie drinks the mixture and throws up. Richie tells Jojo that he tried to run from Parchman but died in the process. He doesn’t remember what happened and ... |
Leonie enters Mam's room to find her in a terrible state. Her room smells like rot. Mam tells Leonie that it is too late. Mam sees Richie on the ceiling. He is vengeful. Richie shouts at Mam, urging her to come with him, but Given shouts at him that Mam is not his mother. Jojo and Pop run in and Leonie jumps into actio... |
In the final chapter, Jojo explains that he sleeps in Leonie's bed now. Leonie and Michael only come back for two days out of every week, and then they leave again. Pop sleeps in Mam's room now and he talks to himself at night, searching for Mam. Although he hoped he will, Jojo is not able to see Mam and Given, he only... |
"Sing, Unburied, Sing" is the first of Ward's novels to introduce a supernatural element. A dead boy, Ritchie, is one of the narrators, and other ghosts are found throughout the novel as they tie the past to the present and future. Likewise, Mam and Pop project the belief in spirituality through gris-gris bags, which c... |
The novel demonstrates the afterlife of slavery in America. Songs and story-telling play a role in building resilience. Singing to the unresting spirits at the end of the story, Kayla represents hope for the future. |
Another theme is of family, for it offers differing insights into the roles of parenting. Though they care for Jojo and Kayla, Leonie and Michael are absent mother and father figures. They tend to dissociate themselves from their responsibilities through drug usage. Thus, Jojo looks to his Pop and Mam as the family's c... |
Racial relations is also discussed in this novel through the family's interracial dynamics. Though Michael appears to love Leonie despite their differing skin colors, his family sternly disapproves of the life he leads. The character of Michael's father, Big Joseph, showcases the lingering tensions of white supremacy i... |
Finally, the theme of water offers much significance in the novel. Water symbolizes the processes of nurturing and developing. Those with water, like River and Mam (who is referred to as the saltwater woman), are able to bloom. Meanwhile, those without water, like those in "Parchman," are withering away without such su... |
Reviewing the novel for "The Washington Post", Ron Charles compared it to George Saunders's "Lincoln in the Bardo" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved"; at NPR, Annalisa Quinn found it "reminiscent of "As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner. |
"Sing, Unburied, Sing" was the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for fiction. This was her second time winning this award. Ward is the first woman and first person of color to receive this honor twice. |
The novel was selected by "Time" magazine and "The New York Times" as one of the top ten novels of 2017. It is also acclaimed as one of the best novels of the year by the "New Statesman", the "Financial Times", and BBC, all of which are located in London. |
Former U.S. President Barack Obama included the novel in a list of the best books he read in 2017. |
It was ranked in Literary Hub as the second best book of the 2010s, behind only Claudia Rankine’s "" (2014). |
The novel also won Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2018 and the Mark Twain American Voice In Literature Award in 2019. |
Annie John, a novel written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985, details the growth of a girl in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. It covers issues as diverse as mother-daughter relationships, lesbianism, racism, clinical depression, poverty, education, and the struggle between medicine based on "scientific fact" and that ba... |
Annie John is then moved to a higher class because of her intelligence. For this reason, Annie is drawn away from her best friend Gwen, while alienating herself from her mother and the other adults in her life. It later becomes clear that she also suffers from some kind of mental depression, which distances her from bo... |
The book's chapters were originally published separately in "The New Yorker", before being combined and published as the novel "Annie John", the stories connected by Kincaid's use of Annie John as the narrator. |
Children growing apart from their parents while becoming adolescents is the major theme in the novel. Annie and her mother share common personalities, goals and even look exactly alike, though they grow apart through the narrative. Barbara Wiedemann writes that Kincaid's fiction is not specifically aimed at a young adu... |
"Annie John" has been noted to contain feminist views. Asked if the relationship between Annie and Gwen was meant to suggest “lesbian tendencies,” Kincaid replied: "No…I think I am always surprised that people interpret it so literally." The relationship between Gwen and Annie is really a practicing relationship. It's ... |
In the story, the theme of colonization is conveyed. England has colonized Antigua, and has reconstructed its society. This is seen when the reader is introduced to Miss George and Miss Edward, teachers at Annie's school, who are both named after English kings. Antigua in return, strongly dislikes England for disposing... |
Water is consistently used throughout the novel to depict the separation between Annie John and her mother. Symbolic references to water (including the sea, rain, and other forms) illustrate Annie's development from childhood to maturity. Near the start of the novel, the reader learns that Annie has both a normal baby ... |
Kincaid's writing form is not in the traditional paragraph form, but run-on sentences and paragraphs with little fragments. Jan Hall, a writer for Salem Press Master Plots, Fourth Edition book states in an article about "Annie John" that “because the novel has no years, months, or dates the story has a sense of timeles... |
Dear Martin, published in 2017 by Crown Publishing Group, is a young adult novel by Nic Stone. It is Stone's debut novel, written as a reaction to the murder of Jordan Davis. The book appeared as #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list. |
Stone began writing the book after a series of racially-charge events, including the 2012 murder of Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old who was killed by man who shot several rounds into a car of teenagers over a dispute about loud rap music, and the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown. Stone was also inspired to write the book for... |
"Dear Martin" has been published and translated in Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, The Netherlands, UK, Turkey, and Romania. |
"Dear Martin" follows Justyce McAllister, a high school student living in Atlanta and attending a predominantly white preparatory high school on a scholarship. Justyce is thrown to the ground and handcuffed by a white police officer. After the incident, Justyce attempts to make sense of life as a black teenager in the ... |
The book received a starred review from Booklist. |
In February 2020, two years after it was first published, "Dear Martin" again hit the New York Times bestseller list, as the #1 Young Adult Paperback. |
Stone wrote a sequel, "Dear Justyce," which was published in October 2020. The book is about an incarcerated teen, Quan, who is on trial for murder charges. Quan first appears in "Dear Martin" as the cousin of Justyce's best friend. Stone was not planning on writing a sequel, but was encouraged by her publisher and dec... |
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl |
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself is an autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave, published in 1861 by L. Maria Child, who edited the book for its author. Jacobs used the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book documents Jacobs's life as a slave and how she gained freedom for herself... |
In the book, Jacobs addresses white Northern women who fail to comprehend the evils of slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity to expand their knowledge and influence their thoughts about slavery as an institution. |
Jacobs composed "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" after her escape to New York, while living and working at Idlewild, the home of writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis. |
Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina in 1813. When she was a child, her mistress taught her to read and write, skills that were extremely rare among slaves. At twelve years old, she fell into the hands of an abusive owner who harassed her sexually. When he threatened to sell her children, she... |
When Jacobs started working on "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" in 1853, many works by abolitionist and African American writers were already in print. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison had started the publication of his weekly "The Liberator". |
In 1845, Frederick Douglass had published his first autobiography, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself", which became a bestseller and paved the way for subsequent slave narratives. |
The white abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, published "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852, artfully combining the genres of slave narratives and sentimental novels. Although a work of fiction, Stowe based her novel on several accounts by eyewitnesses. |
However, the relationship between black and white abolitionist writers was not without problems. Garrison supplied a preface to Douglass' "Narrative" that would later be analyzed as latently racist, and the relationship between the two male abolitionists deteriorated when Garrison was less than supportive to the idea o... |
In the antebellum period, the Cult of True Womanhood was prevalent among upper and middle-class white women. This set of ideals, as described by Barbara Welter, asserted that all women possessed (or should possess) the virtues of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Venetria K. Patton explains that Jacobs an... |
They also showed that the institution of slavery made it impossible for African-American women to control their virtue, as they were subject to the social and economic power of men. Jacobs showed that slave women had a different experience of motherhood but had strong feelings as mothers despite the constraints of thei... |
Jacobs was clearly aware of the womanly virtues, as she referred to them as a means to appeal to female abolitionists to spur them into action to help protect enslaved black women and their children. In the narrative, she explains life events that prevent Linda Brent from practicing these values, although she wants to.... |
Linda Brent is Harriet Jacobs, the narrator and protagonist. |
Aunt Martha is Molly Horniblow, Linda's maternal grandmother. After briefly talking of her earliest childhood, her parents and her brother, Jacobs begins her book with the history of her grandmother. At the end of the book, Jacobs relates the death of her grandmother in 1853, soon after Jacobs had obtained her legal fr... |
William is John S. Jacobs, Linda's brother, to whom she is close. |
Ellen is Louisa Matilda Jacobs, Linda's daughter. |
Dr. Flint is Dr. James Norcom, Linda's master, enemy and would-be lover. J. F. Yellin, after researching his surviving private letters and notes, writes about his personality: "Norcom was a loving and dominating husband and father. In his serious and sophisticated interest in medicine, his commitment as a physician, an... |
Mrs. Flint is Mary "Maria" Norcom, Linda's mistress and Dr. Flint's wife. |
Emily Flint is Mary Matilda Norcom, Dr. Flint's daughter and Linda's legal owner. |
Mr. Sands is Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, Linda's white sexual partner and the father of her children, Benny and Ellen. |
The second Mrs. Bruce is Cornelia Grinnel Willis. |
The other chapters are dedicated to special subjects: Chapter 3 describes the hiring out and selling of slaves on New Year's Day, chapter 8 is called "What Slaves Are Taught to Think of the North", chapter 9 gives various example of cruel treatment of slaves, chapter 12 describes the narrator's experience of the anti-b... |
Both Harriet Jacobs and her brother John frustrate the threats of their master by simply choosing what was meant as a threat: When Dr. Norcom throws John into the jail, which regularly serves as the place to guard slaves that are to be sold, John sends a slave trader to his master telling him he wants to be sold. When ... |
Harriet Jacobs also knows to fight back with words: On various occasions, she doesn't follow the pattern of submissive behavior that is expected of a slave, protesting when her master beats her and when he forbids her to marry the man she loves, and even telling him that his demand of a sexual relationship is against t... |
Jacobs's employer, N. P. Willis, was the founding editor of the "Home Journal". Some years before she started working on her book, he had published an anonymous story called "The Night Funeral of a Slave" about a Northerner who witnesses a funeral of an old slave which he interprets as a sign for the love between the m... |
However, she is very critical regarding the religion of the slaveholders, stating "there is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south." She describes "the contemptuous manner in which the communion [was] administered to colored people". She also tells of a Methodist class leader, who in civil li... |
Jacobs's distinction between "Christianity and religion at the south" has a parallel in Frederick Douglass's "Narrative", where he distinguishes the "slaveholding religion" from "Christianity proper", between which he sees the "widest, possible difference", stating, "I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christiani... |
According to Yellin, "Incidents" has a "radical feminist content." Yellin states that "Incidents" is linked to the then popular genre of the seduction novel. That genre, examples of which include "Charlotte Temple" (1791) and "The Quadroons", written in 1842 by M. Lydia Child, who would later become the editor of "Inci... |
According to Yellin, "a central pattern in "Incidents" shows white women betraying allegiances of race and class to assert their stronger allegiance to the sisterhood of all women": When Jacobs goes into hiding, a white woman who is herself a slaveholder hides her in her own house for a month, and when she is threatene... |
Jacobs presents herself as struggling to build a home for herself and her children. "This endorsement of domestic values links "Incidents" to what has been called 'woman's fiction'", in which a heroine overcomes hardships by finding the necessary resources inside herself. But unlike "woman's fiction", ""Incidents" is a... |
Jacobs discusses "the painful personal subject" of her sexual history "in order to politicize it, to insist that the forbidden topic of sexual abuse of slave women be included in public discussions of the slavery question." In telling of her daughter's acceptance of her sexual history, she "shows black women overcoming... |
The book was promoted via the abolitionist networks and was well received by the critics. Jacobs arranged for a publication in Great Britain, which appeared in the first months of 1862, soon followed by a pirated edition. ""Incidents" was immediately acknowledged as a contribution to Afro-American letters." |
The publication did not cause contempt as Jacobs had feared. On the contrary, Jacobs gained respect. Although she had used a pseudonym, in abolitionist circles she was regularly introduced with words like "Mrs. Jacobs, the author of Linda", thereby conceding her the honorific "Mrs." which normally was reserved for marr... |
"Incidents" "may well have influenced" "Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted", a 1892 novel by black author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, "which in turn helped shape the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and other foremothers of black women writing today." |
Still, "Incidents" was not republished, and "by the twentieth century both Jacobs and her book were forgotten". |
The new interest in women and minority issues that came with the American civil rights movement also led to the rediscovery of "Incidents". The first new editions began to appear at the end of the 1960s. |
Prior to Jean Fagan Yellin's research in the 1980s, the accepted academic opinion, voiced by such historians as John Blassingame, was that "Incidents" was a fictional novel written by Lydia Maria Child. However, Yellin found and used a variety of historical documents, including from the Amy Post papers at the Universit... |
In 2004, Yellin published an exhaustive biography (394 pages) entitled "Harriet Jacobs: A Life". |
In a New York Times review of Yellin's 2004 biography, David S. Reynolds states that "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" "and "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" are commonly viewed as the two most important slave narratives." |
In the "Acknowledgments" of his best selling 2016 novel, "The Underground Railroad (novel)", Colson Whitehead mentions Jacobs: "Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, obviously." The heroine of the novel, Cora, has to hide in a place in the attic of a house in Jacobs's native North Carolina, where like Jacobs she is no... |
In 2017 Jacobs was the subject of an episode of the Futility Closet Podcast, where her experience living in a crawlspace was compared with the wartime experience of Patrick Fowler. |
According to a 2017 article in "Forbes" magazine, a 2013 translation of "Incidents" by Yuki Horikoshi became a bestseller in Japan. |
Katherine McKittrick reveals how theories of geography and spatial freedom produce alternative understandings and possibilities within Black feminist thought. By centering geography in her analysis, McKittrick portrays the ways in which gendered-racial-sexual domination is spatially organized. McKittrick writes, "Recog... |
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834 at the age of 20, published the book in Lon... |
The novel explores slavery's destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulattoes or mixed-race people, and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America." Featuring an enslaved mixed-race woman named Currer and her daughte... |
The novel played with known 19th-century reports that Thomas Jefferson had an intimate relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and fathered several children with her. Of mixed race and described as nearly white, she was believed to be the half sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, the youngest ... |
As an escaped slave, due to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, William Wells Brown was at risk in the United States. While in England on a lecture tour in 1849, he decided to stay there with his two daughters after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, as he was at risk of being taken by slave catchers. He published ... |
The narrative of "Clotel" plays with history by relating the "perilous antebellum adventures" of a young mixed-race slave Currer and her two light-skinned daughters fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Because the mother is a slave, according to partus sequitur ventrem, which Virginia adopted into law in 1662, her daughters a... |
After the death of Jefferson, Currer and her daughters are sold as slaves. |
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