SLAVERY & DE-HUMANIZATION

From the 17th–19th centuries, 12.5 million enslaved Africans were brought from Central and West Africa to the Americas. The colonial system of slavery—which was practiced in all of the original 13 British colonies—is referred to as chattel slavery. In this system, enslaved people were the personal property of their owners for life, a source of labor or a commodity that could be willed, traded or sold like livestock or furniture. Enslavers had complete control over the bodies and lives of those they enslaved and their children with most enslaved people trapped in bondage until they died. 

IDENTITY

The transatlantic slave trade took the enslaved Africans away from their roots. There was a conscious effort by the slave owners to remove the identity of the slaves, to keep a diverse mix of ethnic peoples so that the enslaved on their plantation would find it hard to come together and plot against their owners. Plantation owners will attempt to blot out the African identity of their slaves.  As Malcolm X will say many generations later, “Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.” 

RESISTANCE

Throughout American history, enslaved people have resisted bondage in a variety of ways: some escaped, rebelled, or sabotaged work tools or work product. They also resisted in more subtle ways, refusing privately to use names given to them by slave holders and maintaining their identity by keeping track of family members. Music, folk tales, and other African cultural forms also became weapons of resistance.  

MEMORY & STORYTELLING

Aware that these ties to Africa helped the slaves feel human and connected to their happy pasts, enslavers adopted a number of strategies to break from this connection. But it’s clear that the slaves did, in fact, remember their old lives and cultural legacies. Copper Sun suggests that many enslaved attempted to keep their connections to their memories, stories, and names alive. Those memories—allow them to be more than slaves. 

GENDER, RACE & POWER

Copper Sun delves into a power structure that puts wealthy, white, and male slave owners at the top and everyone else beneath them. By exploring different intersections of race, gender, and wealth, the novel suggests that in order to understand the time period in which the novel takes place (1738) and the colonial South more broadly, it’s essential to move beyond thinking strictly in terms of white versus Black. 

 TRANSFORMING AMERICA

Slavery was more than a labor system; it influenced every aspect of colonial thought and culture. The uneven relationship it engendered impacted relationships between white and black people for centuries. Slavery was an integral part of a developing nation, challenging the long held notion that slavery was exclusively a Southern enterprise. Consider the active role that Africans and African Americans took in surviving their bondage and shaping their own lives.