![]() The white race believes––believes with all its heart––that it is their right to take the land. Yet here we are.Īnd America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. By every fact of history, it can't exist. Who told you the negro deserved a place of refuge? Who told you that you had that right? Every minute of your life's suffering has argued otherwise. Still we run, tracking by the good full moon to sanctuary. When you saw your mother sold off, your father beaten, your sister abused by some boss or master, did you ever think you would sit here today, without chains, without the yoke, among a new family? Everything you ever knew told you that freedom was a trick-yet here you are. Here's one delusion: that we can escape slavery. Nothing's going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. The narrator observes that, “the women in the colored dormitories of South Carolina believed they knew liberty, but the surgeons' knives cut them to prove otherwise.” Elsewhere, the narrator remarks: “Because that's what you do when you take away someone's babies-steal their future.” Both these statements emphasize the idea that even free black people are at a constant risk of having their lives and future taken away from them, and that no black person living during the era of slavery can access freedom that isn’t in some sense haunted by death. Similarly, the black people who live in the South Carolina dormitories think they are free, only to discover that they are in fact being subjected to a medical experiment that will infect them with illness and prevent them from having children, two fates that are a kind of metaphorical (and in some cases literal) death. The free utopia of Valentine’s farm meets a bloody end when Ridgeway and other whites descend on the community and murder those who live there. Meanwhile, black people’s freedom is always haunted by the threat of death because of the inescapable system of white supremacy. This idea of Mabel’s freedom encourages Caesar and Cora to escape, and thus ultimately bestows on Cora a chance at life and freedom. Even Mabel, who dies from a snakebite shortly after fleeing Randall, achieves a kind of immortality by forever evading the slave-catchers who attempt to track her down: since Mabel’s body is swallowed by a swamp, none of the characters ever find out what happened to her, and thus they end up imagining that she is living a life of freedom up north. The only way of escaping this slow death is by running away. Life on the plantation is to some extent a form of living death-in Cora’s words, a way of being killed “slowly” by white slave-owners. In another sense, however, death and freedom are opposites. These events highlight that the struggle between black freedom and white supremacy is a fight to the death both can survive only through the murder of the other. For example, soon after fleeing Randall plantation Cora kills a 12-year-old white boy, and when Terrance Randall dies it is suggested that the distress caused by Cora’s escape led to his death. Of course, this warning seeks to conceal the fact that sometimes enslaved people do escape on the rare occasions when runaways are successful, their freedom is also often linked to the deaths of others. The name “Freedom Trail” serves as a warning that, for enslaved people, the search for freedom means certain death. ![]() The twinning of freedom and death is encapsulated most powerfully in the “ Freedom Trail,” a seemingly endless path along which runaways and those who try to help them are hanged and left on display. In this way, freedom and death are inherently interlinked for black people living under slavery. ![]() ![]() Furthermore, the likelihood of dying in an escape attempt is so high that slaves who choose to run away are choosing death as much as they are choosing freedom. Meanwhile, other enslaved people turn to suicide or religion as an escape from their conscious reality, both of which promise freedom in death. However, Cora notes that even those who would never consider running away still dream of freedom: “Every dream a dream of escape.” Although enslaved people may not be able to consciously imagine freedom, they seek freedom in their unconsciousness. Most of the enslaved people Cora knows-including Cora herself-have never known freedom, and the system of slavery is so brutal and expansive that most of them cannot imagine becoming free during their lifetime. ![]()
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