Word: freedmen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...class respectability in a Midwestern town. Song of Solomon will inevitably be compared with Roots. But any comparison must end with the superior quality of Morrison's imagination and prose. Her fictional family is stuck with the portentous name of Dead, the result of an error at the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia in 1869. "The man behind the desk was drunk," explains one of the Deads. "He asked Papa where he was born. Papa said Macon. Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said, 'He's dead.' The Yankee wrote...
...early months of the struggle with England, especially in New England, many Negroes fought in the colonial forces, and it was informal policy to offer freedom to any slave who joined a muster. Since early this year, however, the Congress and General Washington have banned Negroes (slaves and freedmen alike) from the Continental Army-the only official exceptions being black men who have already served. The various colonies have followed suit, except for Virginia, which still permits all free men to serve in its militia. The immediate reason for the ban is to discourage slaves from leaving their masters...
Grave Necessity. New York City's nonsectarian hospitals almost unanimously reported that they would continue to perform abortions for women up to 20 weeks pregnant, or later if there is grave medical necessity, subject to the safeguards established by the state. At Washington's Freedmen's Hospital, Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital and Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, the reaction was the same. In Chicago, leading OBG services conceded that they would take more care to establish the length of gestation-but otherwise, no change. In California, where a 20-week law is in effect, there...
...complex tale. Born a slave in Louisiana, she sets forth with a group of freedmen and -women for Ohio after Emancipation. Only she and a boy named Ned (whom she raises as her son) escape massacre by vigilantes determined to keep her people in their place -that is, in the old slave quarters of the plantations. Indeed, it is to this world that she retreats to work as a field hand in order to support the child. She escapes briefly when she marries a dashing black cowboy and goes to Texas, where he has a good life as a broncobuster...
...like a gigantic Mississippi riverboat minstrel show. The men at the Masonic Lodge dressed in top hats and black morning coats; the ladies at the Baptist church wore flowing skirts and bandannas; and everybody spoke in an exaggerated Deep South drawl. In these mannerisms they imitated both their forebears, freedmen who returned from the U.S. in 1822 and subsequently founded Africa's first republic, and their president, William Vacanarat Shadrach ("Uncle Shad") Tubman, who ran the country with a kind of dandified despotism from 1944 until his death...