Initial Response: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

I like the style of writing, she doesn’t really seem to waste any time. I wish I had heard of this piece before, I really like it. It’s very sad, she doesn’t even need to use must descriptive narrative to make it sad. The situations and stories are so strange and horrible they make the emotion apparent. In that way she’s almost more of a historian than a writer. She simply records the truth without must writing style or tact, and although she has an obvious slant or bias, it’s a moral one.
It’s hard to imagine that someone would own someone else’s own child and refuse to sell the child to them. Everything is, as I’ve learned, culturally-based. By that, I mean, if you live in a culture where such things are commonplace, you will not object, and thus atrocities can be made commonplace by necessity of culture, althought there are few cultures where this is necessay. I suppose it was the economic dependency of the time. The south, from what I’ve read, had over-expanded, over-imported slaves, become lazy and far too dependent on free manual labor, and had no option but to abandon their lives or continue to commit social injustice. This does not justify it, but does explain it for the most part. The bright spots in the stories are almost heart-warming, whatever that means.
Like in Aesop’s fables, the morals are made clear through the actions of the characters and the outcomes. The first story is the saddest, and in saying that my least favorite and most favorite. Like a movie you love but hate the ending.
The slave’s New Years day is also a very sad little story. These parts of our history must be faced by the people, because they are so hard to face. In my social problems class, we’re reading lies my teacher told me, what I learned from this book is largely appalling, but is the simple truth of our history. People have argued with me that we should not teach this to people as it doesn’t promote nationalistm. I’ve said we should live in a country that deserves nationalism.
This is off-topic.
The troubles of girlhood story is probably my least favorite, a little strange and pointless.