Word: slaving
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...Schickel, in reviewing Roots [Jan. 24], finds it incomprehensible that a black American would view all whites as equally responsible for the institution of slavery. But even when New England abolitionists mouthed cliches about the evil of slavery, they would wear cotton clothing, while sitting on furniture handcrafted by slave artisans, eating food cooked by black women. Slavery was an all-pervading fact of American life. All Americans benefited from it. Roots is the most valuable addition to African American literature in the past hundred years...
...artistic shortcomings, Roots had a raw, visceral impact on many viewers. A handful of people, mostly teenagers, reacted violently. In Greenville, Miss., some white junior high school students taunted blacks: "You ol' slave, my granddaddy owned you once upon a time." Chanting "Roots, roots, roots," a gang of black toughs roughed up four white youths at Detroit's Ford High School. A well-to-do white woman in Atlanta voiced one fear: "I thought Roots was awful. The blacks were just getting settled down, and this will make them angry again." African History Professor John Henrik Clarke of New York...
...Some slave women were raped and others treated with kindness. A slave named Frank Bell in New Orleans was often kept in chains; his master discovered that Bell had married and, in a drunken rage, cut off the girl's head...
...Sand neurotically seeking to be the "male" in her heterosexual relationships. Some of her lovers--including consumptive Chopin--were "weak", younger and easily dominated. But Sand was also capable of being pathetically submissive, promising one brutal lover, on the verge of deserting her, she'd be his "devoted black slave...
Only then, she later wrote, did she understand the fate of the "afflicted"--those who, unlike the "oppressed" who harbour either real or imagined hope for revolution, must live with the inexorable fear that life will victimize them. "Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave," she wrote shortly before her death...