A look at voice in The Color Purple and slave narratives.

The Power of Voice

Narrative - a spoken or written account of connected events; a story

Plaything Narrative

Narratives can be powerful. They can change the world with moving, informative, and shocking first hand accounts of real events. The Power of The

Narrative

My strategy to survive was to appease the soldiers and to make friends with them. I thought, if only we could make friends with these soldiers, then we would survive.

But porters can die at any time. For example, if a soldier got angry and just shot me with his gun, nothing would happen to him. I would just die, like a chicken or a rat. To Tanintharyi Division, they send 500 porters every year. Of the 500, only 72 porters make it back to the prison. If you survive, you survive.

I was a porter for nearly six months.

~ Lai Pa, 34-year-old man from Burma

Finding your voice and being able to effectively communicate your story gives you power over your life and what happens to you.

In today’s era, the internet, blogs, podcasts, and social media have given the average person untold power to shape their world around them.

“He took it. He took it while I was sleeping. Kilt it out there in the woods. Kill this one too, if he can”(2).

“Sometimes I think Shug never loved me…what would she love? I ast myself. My hair is short and kinky because I don’t straighten it anymore. Once Shug say she love it no need to…nothing special here for nobody to love…nothing young and fresh. My heart be young and fresh though, it feel like it blooming blood” (259).

What could have been so terrible as to make the transcendentalists reconsider that humankind was basically good?

Transcendentalists believed in the inner goodness of humankind. This belief of theirs eventually ran into a roadblock, however.

Fredrick Douglass1817 - 1895

Fredrick Douglass

Was a slave for the first twenty-one years of his life before escaping to the North where slavery was abolished.

Although it was against the law, Freddy’s owner Mrs. Auld taught him how to read.

After Mrs. Auld’s husband found out, Douglass secretly educated himself from a book on public speaking – The Columbian Orator.

Fredrick Douglass

In 1838, Douglass escaped the South and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

The MASS (Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society) hired him to speak about his experiences as a slave and he spoke so passionately they hired him to lecture about his experiences around the country.

While giving speeches, Douglass was mocked, insulted, and sometimes had rotten eggs and vegetables thrown at him by pro-slavery men and women.

Fredrick Douglass

Douglass spoke and wrote so well and appeared so educated people began to doubt he had ever even been a slave. They thought his stories were being made up by the anti-slavery movement to get people on their side.

In 1845, in order to prove he actually was who he said he was, Douglass published his autobiography – Narrative in the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave.

Audience:•White• Educated• Rich•Men/Women• Christian

Annotate the ways Fredrick Douglass appeals to his intended audience.

“After running thus for a considerable distance, they finally upset the cart, dashing it with great force against a tree, and threw themselves into a dense thicket”(562).

“Mr. Covey gave us enough to eat, but scare time to eat it. We were often less than five minutes taking our meals”(563).

“I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me…my natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed…behold a man transformed into a brute!”(564).

“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man”(564).

“At this moment I resolved, for the first time, to go to my master, enter a complaint, and ask his protection”(565).

“From the crown of my head to my feet, I was covered with blood. My hair was all clotted with dust and blood; my shirt was stiff with blood. My legs and feet were torn in sundry places with briers and, and were also covered with blood”(566). thorns

“The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn’t want to get hold of me again. ‘No,’ thought I, ‘you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before’”(569).