Word: slave
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...depicts life in Communist countries, shows people dying in prison, idle factories, cannon ready to fire, churches demolished, and people in slave camps. The sharpest touch: a mask of Rivera peering from behind a dollar-sign totem pole...
...time before the revolution of 1910, tells how the peons used to be duped into almost lifelong servitude on the big estates and timber properties. Like a man telling an enthralling tale to children, Traven describes the plain peasant, Candido, going off to the mahogany forest to join the slave-labor gang. As a fee-greedy doctor has let his wife die, Candido has to take his two little sons along: also with him are his devoted sister and three suckling pigs which, whatever their symbolic significance may be, are the most likable piglets in contemporary literature...
...mahogany capitalists and their overseers have only one aim: to make each slave fell four tons of timber a day. They have found that flogging with a bull whip has a poor effect on physique, so instead, they "hang" the workers when necessary, i.e., leave them suspended from a tree by ropes, where red ants, ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes can liven them up. Hanging is done at night so as to add to the physical anguish "the unspeakable, inexplicable horror . . . that the Indian feels of phantoms and specters...
...Brother) take on the near-heroic quality of a modern tragic Odyssey. Simple and idealistic, he hopes to become an educator, to help advance his people. He loves his college, has unquestioning respect for its famed Negro president and its millionaire Northern benefactors. He is sure that his slave grandfather must have been wrong when he laid down his deathbed formula for dealing with the whites: "Live with your head in the lion's mouth . . . Overcome 'em with yesses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they...
...what he is. "Whenever I discover whe I am, I'll be free," says the boy. "I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own." At the end, the fog of his confusions lifting, Author Ellison's hero thinks of his slave grandfather, knows that, "Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity-that was left to his 'free' offspring...