Word: slave
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...marker, no mention of any of this on Sullivan's Island--just beach homes and speedboats bobbing in the sun. "The reason people are afraid to talk about slavery is the terrible truth of someplace like this," says Ball. He learned of the pest houses while writing Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), his chronicle of his slave-owning family and the blacks they held. "Look at this," he sighs. "The story has absolutely been erased...
...colluding to forget. But periodically the zeitgeist erupts with flashbacks to a tragedy whose costs are still exacted on the street corners of America, at water coolers, in classrooms, along Sunday pews. Now is such a time. Last month in New Orleans, the name of George Washington, a former slave owner, was removed from a school. This week Amistad, Steven Spielberg's epic about a famous 1839 slave revolt, premieres. Currently in repertory at the Chicago Lyric Opera is Anthony Davis' opera, also titled Amistad...
...there is a spate of new books focused on slaves and enslavers. Velma Maia Thomas offers Lest We Forget (Crown; $29.95), an interactive children's book serious enough for parents. Readers remove slave sale receipts from envelopes and pull back a paper ship hatch to find slaves stacked like cordwood. British historian Hugh Thomas (no relation) has published The Slave Trade (Simon & Schuster; $37.50). Tracking the barter of Africans from 1440 to 1870, Thomas ranges through Europe, Arabia, Africa and the Americas. As societies spin and tug at one another like a warped solar system, a sad message emerges...
Unconvinced, Ball, 39, a journalist, set out three years ago to discover what had happened to those slaves, "to bring the stories of the obscure side by side with the powerful, as they had been in life." He found, of course, violence and the mixing of black blood with white. But the voices rising from letters, family papers and the tea-colored pages of "blanket books"--records of provisions given to slaves--told uglier truths. One Ball ancestor, Henry Laurens, the first president of the Continental Congress, was also the largest slave trader in America...
Throughout the movie, Spielberg takes special care to favor the Africans in all of their trials and tribulations, without adequately developing all sides of the issue, or even clearly defining what the issue is. He provides an overwrought sequence depicting the Africans' torment at the hands of the slave traders, self-consciously attempting to be "powerful." The characters in the movie, let alone the audience, certainly don't need the guilt Spielberg tries to foist upon someone, anyone, with this sequence, especially since the cruelty of the slave trade is never at issue in any of the trials. As soon...