VOCABULARY WORDS FROM THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
MISTRESS
Mistress in the Black history of slavery in 19th century America referred to the wife of the master who bought the slaves for labor and owned them. The master and the mistress were wealthy people who owned the plantations where most slaves worked. Most of them were cruel to the slaves as they treated them as their property. However, some mistresses were motherly to the slaves and even initiated to educate them. Born into slavery, Harriet Jacobs was happy with her family’s status. She was never treated with cruelty and her parents provided the needed protection. This protection continued even after her mother’s death when her kind mistress let her into her home and nurtured her. The mistress taught her to read, sew and did her part to ensure that she grew up into a normal person (Harriet Jacobs, 2006). Also born into slave parents, Phyllis Wheatley was sold to John and Susanna Wheatley in Boston. She was seen by her owners, especially her mistress, as having talent in poetry writing. They supported her skills by teaching her to read and write. Though she never had formal education, she was well-versed in Latin and Greek and was recognized as the first African American to publish a book as well as earn a living thru writing (Women, 2006).
SLAVE
The word “slave” can be traced back to the history of early Africans in the American soil during the time when developing territorial colonies were emergent and Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. There was a need to keep the economy of the new country solvent. Therefore, in 1619, the first Africans were brought to America in slave ships as indentured servants in a contract that was said to last from 4 to 7 years and then they would be free. Slaves served their masters by working and running errands for them. However, most of them were beaten, terrorized and treated inhumanely by the White masters. Still, some of them were able to free themselves and advocated the resistance against slavery (Obadina, 2000; Sylvester, 1998). Some famous slaves who were brave enough to fight its evils were Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglas. Equiano was born in the late 18th century and became a slave as a young boy when he was taken from his home in the absence of his parents, sold into slavery in another village, moved to another one as again a slave, sold to European slavers and forced into a slave ship along with many other captured Black people. He experienced many horrible experiences in slavery including seeing his fellow slaves beaten to death and commit suicide to escape. However, he managed to struggle for freedom and acquire learning to become a major advocate of putting an end to slavery (Brians, 1998). Frederick, on the other hand, was born a slave at Holmes Hill Farm owned by Aaron Anthony, one of the wealthiest men in Maryland, in 1818 to a Black mother and a white father whom he barely knew. He was taken cared of by his grandmother but eventually fell into the Master’s cruel hands when the latter died. He learned to read and write though personal efforts and eventually knew about the abolitionists. He started to detest slavery and was encouraged to fight for emancipation. He became the first black citizen to hold high rank in the United States government as United States minister and consul general to Haiti (Frederick, n.d.).
SLAVE TRADE
In 1492, the Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus discovered for Europe a New World which was America. The discovery marked the beginning of an organized triangular trade between Africa, Europe and the New World. European slave ships, mainly British and French, took people from Africa to the New World and initially placed them to the West Indies to supplement local Indians decimated by the Spanish Conquistadors. The slave trade which lasted until the 1800s was a systematized practice of turning Black slave workers into prized commodities in a system of manual labor (Obadina, 2000; Sylvester, 1998).
FIELD HAND
The American Heritage Dictionary defined “field hand” as an outdoor worker on a farm (Field, 2004). Most Africans were skilled in agriculture, farming and mining. The need for manual laborers in American plantations and farms owned by wealthy Americans gave rise to the entry of African laborers into American soils. Slaves in the northern American region labored on small farms and as skilled and unskilled workers in factories and along the coast as shipbuilders, fishermen, craftsmen, and helpers of tradesmen (Sylvester, 1998). Slaves were in the fields from sunrise to sunset and at harvest time they did an eighteen hour day. Women worked the same hours as the men and pregnant women were expected to continue until their child was born. Only a month’s rest was allowed for recovery from child-bearing. The women then carried the child on their backs while they worked in the fields. Around the age of five, slave children would also be expected to work on the plantation (Overseers, 2006).
DISCRIMINATION
Discrimination is defined in the dictionary as the act of making a distinction between people on the basis of class, race, religious background, gender, disability, ethnicity, and age without taking into account individual merits and uniqueness (Wikipedia, 2006). Discrimination can be regarded as one of the roots of the story of Black struggle for freedom against slavery in the early America. According to Sylvester (1998) colonial America in that period saw the Blacks as people of inferiority, subhuman category and were born to become slaves and subordinates to White people. Slavery was a form of persecution and justification of this belief. Many of the slaves were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and sold to villages and European traders who brought them to the American territory. They were treated as property and were forced to bondage. Most of the women were raped and their children were also treated as slaves. Some of these children were prevented from being educated since the knowledge that they would acquire can be used to escape and struggle for freedom. However, most of these children were the ones who persevered to free their people from the terrors of slavery through literature and public persuasion and mostly in uprisings.
OVERSEER
Some synonyms of the word overseer are superintendent and supervisor. It typically means someone who has the responsibility to lead and direct a group of people who work for or under him/her. In 1860 it was calculated that about 88 per cent of America’s slave-owners owned twenty slaves or less. However, large landowners would usually own over 100 slaves and relied heavily on overseers to run their plantations. These overseers were under considerable pressure from the plantation owners to maximize profits. They did this by bullying the slaves into increasing productivity. The punishments used against slaves judged to be under-performing included the use of the cart-whip. Not surprisingly the mortality-rate amongst the slaves was high. Studies have shown that over a four-year period, up to 30 per cent of the slave population in America died (Overseers, 2006).
COLORED
Colored and Colored People are North American terms that were commonly used to describe Black people, but also included Asian (brown)/(yellow), Chicano (bronze or brown), and Native American (red). Sometimes the term has a derogatory connotation to it that its usage is controlled (Wikipedia, 2006). The slavery system was a manifestation of prejudice against color. The Negro race, being colored, suffered cruel servitude to wealthy Whites, was deprived of basic rights to education, peaceful living, sufficient food and rest, forced to obey the will of the white man by the lash and chain, and sold to the highest bidder when there was no more use for them (Thomas, 2006).
LYNCHING
Lynching is basically defined as the illegal execution of an accused person by a mob. The term lynching is probably derived from the name Charles Lynch (1736-96), a justice of the peace who administered rough justice in Virginia, USA. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, lynching was one of the many varieties of American brutality in the history of the USA. It became an institutionalized method used by Whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy in the Southern and border states. Several Black leaders responded to this heinous crime through literary persuasion. W.E.B DuBois, a bright Black scholar and author, encouraged his fellow Blacks to fight back against the mob attacks. His pages in The Crisis were filled with persuasion that the Black people should not let themselves die without first trying to save their lives and countering the attack. Ida Wells-Barnett, editor of the Memphis Free Speech, had a more non-violent approach. She pioneered anti-lynching sentiments in the United States and England, served as the chairman of the Anti-Lynching Bureau of the Afro-American Council and published numerous pamphlets exposing the evils of lynching (Gibson, 2006).
AFRO-AMERICAN
An Afro American, also called Black or African American, is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. Many African Americans possess European, Native American and, to a lesser degree, Asian ancestry as well. The African American means an American of African descent (African, 2006). Africans were brought to America as slaves. Most of female African slaves bore children through marriage or rape and raised their children in American soil. Africans were a visible and significant portion of the population in colonial times and now constitute a large portion of the American population (Cottrol, 2006).
MULATTO
Child-bearing among slaves started around the age of thirteen, and by twenty the women would be expected to have four or five children. To encourage child-bearing some plantation owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children. The fathers of these children were sometimes the slave-owner or his white friends. As slaves were the property of the plantation owner, the rape of a black woman by whites was not considered a crime. First-generation children of mixed race were called mulattoes.
Two of the most important mullato slaves were Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Frederick’s slave mother was named Harriet Bailey and was the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. His father was a white man but he never knew or saw him. Booker Taliaferro was born a mulatto slave in Franklin Country on 5th April, 1856. His father was an unknown white man and his mother, the slave of James Burroughs, a small farmer in Virginia, later, married the slave, Washington Ferguson. When Booker entered school he took the name of his stepfather and became known as Booker T. Washington. (Mullatoes, 2006).
PLANTATION
The Online Dictionary defined plantation as an estate where cash crops are grown on a large scale. In the United States and West Indies, it is an estate appropriated to the production of crops and cultivated by local laborers (Definition, 2006). In the Black history of slavery, plantation was the venue of manual labor and many accounts of cruelty, suffering and deaths. The quest for more land and an economy based upon profit were two of the major points that escalated the demand for more slaves in America and the consistency of the slave trade system. Black slave workers became were regarded as commodities and property to be sold and owned. The entire southern American economy and the states in that warm region needed laborers to work on the plantations dealing with rice, indigo, tobacco, sugar cane, and cotton (Sylvester, 1998).
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