Minorities in Life of a Slave Girl, Push, and Song of Solomon :: Song Solomon essays

Minorities within Minorities in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Push, and Song of Solomon      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   In a study about minorities, the groups that are differing from the dominant culture are seen as homogeneous. But, if we look deeper into the groups, we can see that there are distinctions among the minorities concerning lifestyle and social status. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Push, and Song of Solomon the authors gave some examples in the background of their stories that shows people with differential identities of the general identity of the minorities.    In the autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, we see that the "free" African-American people form a group which is much less in number than the slaves. We surely cannot properly call them "minorities" in its general sense, but as having a different situation than the rest of the African-American population. When taking the stories of Jacobs as a basis, it is inevitable to talk about only the situation in South.    We can identify the "free" African-Americans in the South as having fulfilled the most important dream of every slave. These people are mostly ex-slaves, who are set free by their masters or who bought their own freedom. With the new generations coming there are also freeborn blacks whose parents were ex-slaves. Although fulfilled their most important dream, these people are not happy and fearless as they should be.    White people of the South just couldn't bear the fact that any black person was called free. In fact the African-Americans were always living with the danger of being unjustly accused of any kind of crime. As Linda is telling us, white people search every house where black people live and put around false evidence to be able to severely punish and even kill the people they hate so much (ch.12). We learn from the stories that is not always a guarantee to be free from slave hood. Linda tells us how her grandmother was set free as a child but then recaptured and sold to other white people as a slave (341-342).    There are also some rules concerning the marriage of these so called "free" African-Americans. If a free black man is married to a slave woman, he has no power to protect his wife from any kind of abuse coming from her master.