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Select excerpts from these texts that reflect aspects of enslaved life relevant to this episode.
Examples of focus areas include:
Enslaved Families: What challenges did they face? Were the challenges faced
structural or individual? Both? How?
Women: What particular vulnerabilities did enslaved women face? How did this shape
how they felt about themselves? Their children? Their men? What strategies were used to
challenge the potential violence they faced? Were they able to resist? If so, how?
Men: What vulnerabilities did enslaved men face? How did this shape how they felt
about themselves? Their children? Their women? Within a patriarchal social order what
impacts did this have on their sense of masculinity? Were they able to resist? If so, how?
SECONDARY
Definition – Patriarchy
A system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely
excluded from it.
Extension: Contemporary Fiction – Beloved
The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison was inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved
woman who fled with her husband and four children to Cincinnati, Ohio. When “slave catchers”
surrounded the house they were barricaded in, Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter with a
butcher knife rather than see her return to slavery. Morrison’s Beloved grapples with the question
of how such an act affects not only the mother’s life, but also the lives of her children and others
around her.
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