THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

on sugar transforming a lesson in the cultivation of sugar into a discussion of slavery.
The conversation concludes with a pledge by the Harcourt children to abstain from the
products of slave labor. Mental Improvement was reprinted by American publishers. As
a child Lucretia Mott memorized passages from Mental Improvement. 58
Chandler was also likely influenced by Quaker convert Amelia Opie, a
contemporary of Wakefield. Like Wakefield, many of Opie’s works were published in
England by Harvey and Darton and widely reprinted in the United States. Her poem,
“The Negro Boy’s Tale: A Poem Addressed to Children,” originally published during the
slave trade abolition campaign, was reprinted in 1824 by Harvey and Darton during the
emancipation campaign. 59 The poem recounts the story of West Indian slave Zambo,
who is driven to suicide by the cruelty of his overseer. 60 The Black Man’s Lament; or
How to Make Sugar, published by Harvey and Darton in 1826, is an alternative history of
sugar making. Like Wakefield’s Mental Improvement, the cultivation and production of
sugar cane is intimately linked to the abuses of slavery. Opie connected “the Black
man’s woes” to the “White man’s crime.” The “tall gold stems” of the sugar cane
contained:
58
Priscilla Wakefield, Mental Improvement, Ann B. Shteir, ed. (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues
Press, 1995), 73-82; Bacon, Valiant Friend, 13.
59 Moira Ferguson dates “The Negro Boy’s Tale” original publication to 1795. The Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography dates the poem to 1802, when it was included in Opie’s book, Poems.
See Ferguson, Subject to Others, 361 n.17; Gary Kelly, “Opie , Amelia (1769–1853),” in Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004),
http://libproxy.uta.edu:2422/view/article/20799 (accessed February 13, 2010). Deborah de Rosa notes only
the 1824 reprint. De Rosa, Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 14.
60 Amelia Opie, “The Negro Boy’s Tale,” Liberator, August 11, 1832.
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