Word: slaving
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sometimes the epiphanies carry the voices of Negro slaves--Joe and Emily and Dara; Sue and Bess and Sara. Winfrey says she has come to know each of them personally and calls them in at will to guide her in her work. The spirits began visiting her a few years ago, shortly after she bought the property records of various plantations at a Sotheby's auction. A collector of slave memorabilia, Winfrey cherishes the slave papers because these documents serve as the best vessel for connecting her--through name, age and price--to the real human legacy of slavery. While...
...particular. Her mother discouraged her studious child from reading books for leisure, viewing the activity as irrelevant to the realities of a poor, illegitimate black girl. But while under her grandma's care, Winfrey spent most of her time at the library and curled up at home reading such slave books as Jubilee, Margaret Walker's 1966 novel about a black woman during the antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction years, and God's Trombones, the 1927 collection of folk sermons in verse by James Weldon Johnson. "For me," she says, "getting my library card was like getting American citizenship...
...time Winfrey was a teenager, her gift as an orator and dramatist had won her considerable popularity at both church and school, and she often recited moving depictions of slave life. She began using the iron-willed protagonists she found in black literature to fire her dreams of rising beyond the back-breaking work that seemed the destiny of most of the black people she knew. "I remember Grandma trying to teach me how to wash clothes and lay them across the line with clothespins, making lye soap, killing the hogs, wringing the chickens' necks, and she'd say, 'Watch...
...course I'm grateful that the Russians no longer send people to slave-labor camps for remarking that the factory's party boss is getting a bit plump, but I'm confused about why it's all right for the Chinese to do that sort of thing and still be our pals. See how complicated it is? Sometimes I find myself wondering what they did with the Iron Curtain after the cold war ended. Did they throw it out? Or is it just in a basement somewhere with a lot of large busts of Lenin, ready to be put back...
BELOVED Jonathan Demme directs Toni Morrison's story of a former slave (Oprah Winfrey) and her brooding brood...