WILLFUL IGNORANCE ENCOURAGES RACISM
My Name is Not Angelica
by Scott O’Dell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989)
Introduction
Slavery is one of the severest forms of racism. It is the complete dehumanization of a people based on their physical characteristics.
Summary
Raisha was a princess of a tribal chief in Africa. She was captured by a warring tribe and sold to slave traders who transported her to the West Indies, which had been colonized by the Dutch. She was purchased as a house slave and renamed Angelica, so she would forget she was “Raisha”, an African princess. Her slave owners treated her humanely, but she and her husband wanted to be free.
Slaves continue to escape into the wild and plan a revolt. The governor of the islands passes horrible laws of torture and death for slaves who try to escape captivity or who harm a white person. When the military corner the revolting slaves, the slaves choose to jump off a cliff to their death instead of returning to slavery, torture, and execution. A few months later, laws are passed on some of the islands in the West Indies granting slaves freedom.
Excerpt from pages 55-56
Master van Prok wandered up the path with his whip. He had drunk too much and the whip didn’t crack as it usually did. Still, the slaves heard it. When he went past they were silent.
He paused and called my name. “Are you asleep in there?”
I did not answer.
He thrust his head under the crossed branches that held up the roof. “Angelica, do you hear me?” He said this with a slur. He had swallowed a lot of rum and beer. If I was asleep, he would wake me up. I sat up and said, “I hear you, Master van Prok.”
“Good. I want you to know that Governor Gardelin’s new laws don’t mean you. They are meant only for the thankless, the senseless, the scum who hae forgotten how fortunate they are. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, crossing my middle fingers so as to turn the word Yes into a lie.
“It’s been a hard year for us. The hurricane that leveled our fields, the terrible drought, which still holds us in its grip. Poor crops of sugar cane and therefore little rum, our livelihood. Now the runaways and the awful threat of a revolt. You can see how we are pressed against a stone wall.”
I did see. For a moment I even felt sorry for Master van Prok and his troubles. For all the planters on all the islands.
“You have read “Gronnewold’s Bible,” he said. “You know that the law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth was the rule in ancient times. It was successful then and it will be successful now.”
Never before had he talked to me in this way.
“We have tried everything else and failed,” he said.
I felt bolder than I had ever felt since the day I stood in the slave pen. “You have tried everything except freedom,” I said.
His shoulders stiffened. He cleared his throat.
“Freedom will come,” he said.
“When, sir?”
“When the slaves are ready.”
“They are ready now. They have had enough of the hot pinchers and whips and the hammers that crush bones.”
He stepped inside the hut and stood over me.
“Freedom,” he said. “They do not know what freedom means. Do you?”
“In Africa I was free.”
“To do what? Sleep in the sun? Eat monkey meat and dance?” . . .
“Sleep, eat, dance. That’s all you know about freedom, like the rest of the slaves, those who have sawdust in their heads instead of brains.”
Questions and Discussion
Slave owners justified their mistreatment of the Africans by dehumanizing them, marginalizing their intelligence, and stereotyping them.
What is does “freedom” mean?