Word: slaving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shaft in Africa finds the priapic private investigator John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) on the trail of a ring of modern-day slave traders, who railroad unsuspecting blacks from Africa to Paris and put them to work at menial tasks for starvation wages. This sorry situation is brought to Shaft's attention in an unlikely manner: a large black fellow with a big stick chases the startled detective around his Greenwich Village apartment, brains him and bears him off to the suburban residence of an African diplomat, where he is tested, cajoled and finally hired to hunt down the slavers...
...star of a series of fictional thrillers by David St. John, Ward has had far more exciting adventures. There was the time, for instance, when he was assigned to verify the identity of the man with the scarred face who was returning from 20 years in Soviet slave labor camps to claim the throne of Spain. Or the time he went to Japan on his own and wound up in "a wild round of I Spy, featuring Koto-playing geishas, Chi-Com masters, and a beautiful Nipponese belle who's simply murder in the bath." Hazardous Duty...
...stubbornly retains the dignity of her native culture, she responds to the tortures of the French masters of Guadeloupe with mere surliness and escape. She realizes, as only a few of her fellow sufferers initially do, that there is no cause for her plight beyond the power of the slave-drivers. But Schwarz-Bart leaves to her daughter the ability to retaliate significantly...
Rosalie remembers the eyes which seemed to hurl accusations at the world, and she remembers that her mother and her mother's peg-legged friend also watched the execution with a darting glare. The girl realizes that seemingly placid slaves have made the bearing of their lives into an outcry. When Bayangumay flees the plantation, Rosalie lapses into madness--an epileptic state in which the slave-child first takes for herself the name of Solitude. She survives a pair of doting masters, the initial freedoms gained by the French Revolution, the forced-labor corvees which are then resumed...
ALTHOUGH Schwarz-Bart is dealing with an epic subject at minimal length, telescoping action and using primitively direct means to etch his characters, he nowhere descends to type. The various slaves and Frenchmen are distinct individuals as well as symbols; a major reason for the purity of Solitude's anger is her heritage, developed beyond that of most other slaves. The fantasies of slave-owners are indictment enough without the glaze of the author's own rancor, and one of the oppressors is almost sympathetic, with strong psychological motivations for his actions as a slave-owner (his father had been...