Word: slaving
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Everyone knows the story of Cinderella--how the good and beautiful Cinderella, a slave to her evil and ugly stepsisters, is unexpectedly visited by a transcendent fairy godmother who transforms her rags into a beautiful ball gown, a pumpkin into a carriage and mice into horses. With these new alterations, Cinderella eagerly joins the rest of the elite of the kingdom at the royal ball where she wins the affections of Prince Charming. The clock strikes midnight, her carriage turns back into a pumpkin, Cinderella dramatically runs out of the palace leaving her petite glass slipper behind. No romance would...
That is the factual background of this vivid historical novel -- part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic. Like the author herself, a former ballet dancer and granddaughter of a white slave, the narrator is an American woman residing in Britain who returns home to learn the true story of her grandfather, which he had recorded in coded diaries. Jonathan Carrick had been a "boughten boy," indentured when he was four for $15 to an ice-hearted tobacco farmer named Alvah Stoke. Dickensian is too amiable a word for Jonathan's ordeals. He slept on a dirt floor with...
...slave Cambridge, Phillips realized, simply could not accommodate contemporary conceptions of Black assimilation and resistance. "If you were a slave in the nineteenth century and you had the power of self-expression and self-insight that would be necessary to write the way Cambridge does, there was a good chance you'd acquired those skills from the Bible. [So] there was a damned good chance you were a dyed-in-the-wool Christian, and [that] you had a very strange and haughty and self-regarding view of yourself vis a vis the other slaves. You would think you were better...
...constancy of human nature, on proving that people "back then" were "just like you and me." Emily and Cambridge are indeed recognizable human characters, but they remain largely locked in the ideologies of their time. Emily considers herself a liberal even as she casually spews racist rhetoric; the proud slave Cambridge despises his African birthplace and views his own unconverted wife as a degenerate. Phillips' almost brutal insistence on historical accuracy renders these characters at once alien and sympathetic. It is this combination which makes Cambridge so disturbing and powerful...
Chicu Reddy, as Prospero's exploited slave, Caliban, would naturally dominate a production organized on these lines. For the opening few scenes, he looks like he will. He acts with presence and confidence, playing Caliban as the downtrodden but spirited revolutionary. But that interpretation just doesn't work. Caliban's situation strikes the viewer as poignant because, by our society's terms, he is only semi-human. To transform him into the streetwise troublemaker that Reddy portrays is to dodge that most pressing issue. Before the weaknesses in Reddy's Caliban become obvious, the director loses interest in his brainchild...