Word: slaving
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pronouncements. He comes out of an old tradition--out of the old black African Methodist church, out of rhythm and blues, out of shouts and hollers and revivalism. As a child in a poor area of Cleveland, he heard his father tell of his grandfather who had been a slave. The family took religion very seriously (says Blue, "My daddy wore the Bible out with his eyes,"), and religion remains a very strong facet of Blue's life. Blue began his career as a fabulist by telling stories to his retarded brother, who could neither read nor write, and later...
Blue's material, when closely examined, displays a thorough awareness of his heritage. Occasionally he makes a presentation using slave chains a Harvard professor once loaned to him. "We all have a responsibility to break chains, real ones and invisible ones," he once announced at a men's prison. "It must be done in classrooms and in jail cells...everybody can break chains." With a glimmer in his eye, he asserts that at this moment a riot broke out in the prison. "A coincidence maybe, but this is what happens to a storyteller; if you give your life to storytelling...
...resembles a historical novel, a form that Haley does not seem to have studied too carefully. His narrative is a blend of dramatic and melodramatic fiction and fact that wells from a profound need to nourish himself with a comprehensible past. Haley recreates the Old South of mansions and slave shacks, fully aware that chains and blood ties were at times indistinguishable. The book dramatically details slave family life-birth, courtship, marriage ("jumping the broom"), death and the ever present fear of being sold off and having to leave your...
...story. What a story it turns out to be. The 17-year-old Kunta Kinte is sold to a Spotsylvania County, Va., planter for $850 and renamed Toby. But Kunta does not tame easily. Following his fourth escape attempt, half his right foot is cut off by professional slave catchers. He eventually becomes the buggy driver for a physician. In 1789 Kunta marries a slave woman named Bell, who bears their daughter Kizzy. At 15, Kizzy is sold to a North Carolina planter who promptly rapes...
...becomes a refrain throughout the book. It binds George, who becomes trainer of Massa's fighting cocks, to his own past. In turn, he passes on "Kunta Kinte" to his son Tom, who is emancipated after the Civil War. Tom is a master blacksmith who, as a freed slave, moves his family to Henning, Tenn. The whites welcome his skills but will not allow a black to have his own shop. Rather than work for anyone but himself, Tom rigs a wagon with forge and bellows and begins a successful career as an itinerant blacksmith...