3.Have you ever been an ally for someone who was perceived as “other” in any way?
4.Can you think of a person who might need an ally? What could you do to reach out?
Oral Histories
1.Do you have any ancestors—far back in history or in more contemporary times—who inspire you the way Sarah Armstrong inspired her great-great granddaughter Nina? Does your family tell stories about ancestors, or even about their own lives?
2.If you’ve never done so before, record an oral history from either or both parents about their parents, grandparents, or older ancestors. All you have to do is ask, and either take notes or record their stories. It definitely will give you fresh information about your own history; you may be stunned.
Sources
Ira Berlin, “The Slaves’ Changing World,” A History of the African American People, eds., James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, New York: Smithmark Books, 1995. This essay by a renowned scholar gives details about life in Southern states from 1800 until the Civil War sixty years later. This excellent article is accompanied by reproductions of paintings, photographs of artifacts used on plantations, and drawings. They are as helpful as the text in showing what daily life was like then.
Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era. New York: The New Press, 1997. Gives details about family life in the years just before the Civil War, during the time when Sarah Armstrong was a girl.
Raymond Bial, The Strength of These Arms: Life in the Slave Quarters, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Gives good examples, with pictures, of exactly how some of the cabins looked, what kind of eating utensils enslaved people used, and other details of daily life.
Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Actual stories by ex-slaves.
J. William Evitts, Captive Bodies, Free Spirits: The Story of Southern Slavery, New York: Julian Messner, 1985. Young adult nonfiction by a historian, who details various ways the enslaved people in the South resisted captivity.
Julius Lester, To Be a Slave, New York: Dial Books, 1968. This wonderful little book, a young adult classic now, relied on slave narratives to tell stories about what it might have been like to be a slave.
Gerald McDermott, Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti, New York, Holt, 1988. A children’s book about Anansi, the West African trickster spider, who journeys into misadventures, is rescued by his six spider sons, and finding a globe of light in the forest, puts it up into the sky to become the moon. It’s a wonderful tale from Ghana, the West African country used as a port of departure by slave traders. It is likely Sarah’s people were from Ghana, or at least passed through, coming from another West African country on their way to the United States.
James Mellon, Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember, An Oral History, New York: Avon Books, 1988. This treasure trove has direct excerpts of interviews made in the 1930s with survivors. “A typical interview occurred on the rickety porch of a former slave’s shack …” the book begins. Their remarkable life stories show a great variety of experiences under slavery and give insight into surprising details of daily life. One sentence on a “pit school,” for instance, remembered by Ms. Mandy Jones, provided inspiration for Sarah Armstrong’s own pit school.
Charles Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. This is another collection of interviews with ex-slaves, but this one focuses exclusively on Virginia. “In November 1936, an all-Negro unit of the Virginia Writers’ Project under the direction of Roscoe E. Lewis began interviewing ex-slaves in Virginia and during the next year interviewed more than three hundred elderly Negroes as part of this project,” says the introduction. It gives more fascinating stories about people who were themselves, or whose parents were enslaved. From this book I also got details about the food, work, and stories of escape.
Kwaku Person-Lynn, “Why Do We Jump the Broom?” AfrocentricNews.com, 2003, www.afrocentricnews.com/html/Person_lynn_jump_the_broom.html (accessed May 18, 2011).
Doreen Rappaport, No More! Stories and Songs of Slave Resistance, illustrated by Shane W. Evans, Cambridge, Mass: Candlewick Press, 2002. Big picture book full of examples of people who resisted slavery, many by running away.
William Troy, Hair-breadth Escapes from Slavery to Freedom, Manchester, England: W. Bremner, 1861. This book, as the title indicates, focuses on fugitives; people left in so many ways, from Henry “Box” Brown’s audacious mailing of himself to daring flights on horseback. But most people walked the way Sarah Armstrong did, alone or in small groups. They simply kept heading north. Many were captured, but many escaped.
About the Author
Joan Steinau Lester, Ed.D., is the author of three nonfiction books for adults, the most recent being Fire in My Soul, a civil ights biography of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. The former executive director of the Equity Institute, a national diversity consulting firm, Joan Lester is a frequent NPR commentator and print columnist, as well as a finalist for both the 2010 Bellwether Prize and the 2011 Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Black, White, Other: In Search of Nina Armstrong is her debut novel for young adults.
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Black, White, Other
Copyright © 2011 by Joan Steinau Lester
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lester, Joan Steinau, 1940–
Black, white, other / Joan Steinau Lester.
p. cm.
Summary: Twenty miles from Oakland, California, where fires have led to racial tension, multi-racial fifteen-year-old Nina faces the bigotry of long-time friends, her parents’ divorce, and her brother’s misbehavior, while learning of her great-great grandmother Sarah’s escape from slavery. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-310-72763-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Race relations—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Racially mixed people—Fiction.
4. Divorce—Fiction. 5. Family life—California—Fiction. 6. Great-grandmothers—
Fiction. 7. Fugitive slaves—Fiction. 8. California—Fiction. I. Title.
PZ7.L56288Bl 2011
[Fic]—dc23 2011015208
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