Be sure to examine in detail the language in the quotation as you write your entry. Also, use your titles to give readers a sense of your entry’s main idea.

” I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip…My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop!” (p36)

In this scene, the patrols are physically tormenting and abusing the father of Alice, in front of his wife and daughter. Dana alway witnesses this beating, but by accident. No one knows she’s there in the bushes watching. She talks about how intense and brutal the whipping was. The man is laying there getting shamed in front of his family. She says she can “hear every ragged breath”. It was so intense that it was a challenge for her to stay still and stay quiet. It was unbearable to watch, nothing like she’s ever seen in the movies. She describes it at as her being “far less prepared for the reality of it”. With the last line in that quote, “why didn’t they stop!”, Dana is expressing a sense of confusion. She wasn’t from that time period or area so she had no idea who these white men were and what there motives were for brutalizing this man.

This quote relates to the text as a whole because it is the first encounter she has with slaves ever and she gets to experience what they go through on a daily basis. She is from more than a century later, and she lives in California, whereas Rufus and Alice lived in Maryland. Slavery has been abolished by then. Shortly after, Dana is also spotted by the patrol in front of Alice’s home and receives the same treatment, with the addition of almost getting raped.

“”She said i was a what?” I asked. “Just a strange nigger. She and Daddy both knew they hadn’t seen you before.” “That as a hell of a thing for her to say right after she saw me save her son’s life.” Rufus frowned. “Why?”… His air of innocent questioning confused me. Either he really didn’t know what he was saying, or he had a career waiting in Hollywood. Whichever it was, he wasn’t going to go on saying it to me.” (page 25)

This is a quote from the novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. The quote discusses a major difference between present day in the novel and the past that Dana travels to, which the year 1815. The main problem discussed by Dana and Rufus is this idea that Rufus and/or his mother should not be calling Dana a “nigger”. You can see that Dana has a modern view of the word, which is that the word is never used by anyone because the word is seen as hateful and derogatory. Rufus asks why it is a hell of a thing for his mother to have said about her after saving him. He cant understand the concept of Dana getting mad over being called a “nigger” because during this time it is seen as normal. The word is used to describe black people while also putting them down, showing that they are inferior to whites. This is important because it shows us that there is to be drastic differences in the views of Dana and the views of the people of 1815 in the rest of the novel. It also is important because it shows to us the hard ships Dana will be facing due to her having to acclimate her self to this new racist environment.

“Maybe I’m just like a victim of robbery or rape or something…I don’t have a name for the thing that happened to me, but I don’t feel safe any more” 

The novel opens up with a first person voice who sets the scene following the traumatic loss of her arm to injury. Even though the format of the story is from the first person point of view, it doesn’t take long for a reader to notice the personal tone the narration is done in. Her recounting of the events surrounding the tragedy is shady to say the least. She is unable to coherently answer the police’s questions due to being under sedation along with only being concerned with the whereabouts of her love interest Kevin. Consequently as a result, the story is told in an emotionally driven context; allowing  a reader to either to determine her reliability  on their own. This specific quote takes place following her first time-travelling episode and she is obviously  shook. She has no way of even describing to Kevin what she has just experienced; who reveals she had only been gone for seconds rather than the minutes she is certain she had been absent for. Further reading reveals that her imediate thought afterwards is on the likelihood of the event reoccurring or maybe even continuing where it left off and the possibility of this happening at an inconvenient time. The presentation of this in the text clearly reveals her panic and vulnerabilty that can either persuade a reader to find her honest and credible or hysterical and unreliable.

“‘Don’t argue with white folks,’ [Luke] had said. ‘Don’t tell them ‘no.’ Don’t let them see you mad. Just say ‘yes, sir.’ Then go ’head and do what you want to do. Might have to take a whippin’ for it later on, but if you want it bad enough, the whippin’ won’t matter much.” (96)

This quote is said by Luke to his son, Nigel, advising him on how to interact with white people. He teaches Nigel how to disobey whites’ orders without outwardly  contradicting them. Weylin, Luke’s slave owner, think that Luke does a very good job and makes him overseer. Dana, the narrator of the novel, finds Luke to be very inspiring. Luke shows her how to hide his internal hate and rebelliousness while externally showing servility. However, Luke’s kind behavior and respect he shows to his owner was not enough. Luke was sold by Weylin for supposedly thinking of himself as a white man. One of the important things that I took out of this quote is that the salves behavior is not important. Whether you are good or bad to your owner doesn’t change a thing, you can still be sold. The slaves are not in charge of their lives and have no say in it. Even if you are very careful on how you treat your owner, it doesn’t make a difference. The slave owners make their decisions based on the mood they are in, so pretty much the slaves have to always hope that their owner is always in a good mood. Luke may have been a very inspiring person, but that ended up leading to him being sold by his owner.

“The Creole is generous, hospitable, magnificent, but vain, inconstant, and incapable of serious application; and in this abode of pleasure and luxurious ease vices have reigned at which humanity must shudder. The jealousy of the women was often terrible in its consequences.”

I found this quote interesting because it depicts not only the author’s admiration for the Creole ladies but also her sympathy for the slaves. The author admires the ladies’ bravery and attitude after living through such a horrible ordeal that is the revolution. She compliments their physical appearances as well as their “air of dignity” from “the habit of commanding their slaves.” These women were able to overcome these times by displaying “talents and found resources in the energy of their own minds.” During a time when women were considered inferior to men and merely objects like the slaves, the author lauded the women’s newfound courage and talents.

However, she also recognizes the insanity and brutality that these women also possess. In one account, a mistress ordered for a slave’s head to be cut off after she thought she saw her husband starting to show some affection towards the slave. Then during dinner when her husband didn’t have much of an appetite, she proposed that she has something that would “excite” his appetite and pulls the head of the slave out of the closet. I found this particular scene to be a bit comical because of its absurdity. By using words like “unfortunate victim” to describe the slave and “monster” to describe the mistress, the author displays a sense of understanding that these slaves have it rough too. Towards the end of the letter, the author states that if she ever wanted a friend, she still wouldn’t come to these people because she wouldn’t “rely on their stability.”

“…a plot was discovered, which had been formed by the negros in the town, to seize the arsenal…to join the negros of the plain,overpower the guards,and entering the town, complete the destruction of the white inhabitants.” (page 68)

In Leonora Sansay’s second letter she writes about how much the Cape as changed since her last letter and things aren’t going so well in the area she escape to. The negros were starting to attack the area. This is ironic because based on previous reading we have done in the class, the whites are normally the ones causing the destruction and taking over other’s homes. For insistence , when Christopher Columbus took the Natives lands away from them. He killed most of the Natives believing they are savages and needed to be killed or converted. In other words he wanted to get rid of the Native inhabitants.

So now that the negros are the one’s causing destruction. Sansay writes “complete the destruction of the white inhabitants” to show the plan the negros are trying to accomplish. The negros are trying to took over the whites’ land and make it their own. They don’t want to be seen as the lower classes anymore. In a way they are showing the whites that whites aren’t the superior class. They too can conquer land.

“Creole ladies who, having staid in the Island during the revolution, relate their sufferings in a manner which harrows up the soul;and dwell on the recollection of their long lost happiness with melancholy delight. St Domingo was formerly a garden.”(pg.70)

I found this quote to be incredibly interesting due to the fact that it presents a different point off view that we are not used to. I provides the viewpoint of the creoles who still live in St. Domingo and what has happened to their place in society and how they live after the fact. They describe St. Domingo as a garden and in a way it was with how prosperous it was and after the revolution all of the places on the island that supported the institution of slavery had been destroyed by the slaves and this wonderful prosperous place was gone. But, it was not wonderful and prosperous for everyone, it was only prosperous for white people and creoles.

towards the last half of the third letter she talks about her experiences with creoles and talks about the two types of people she had met. One was extremely jealous and had killed her own baby and showed the head to the husband and the other lost her husband and children when they were killed by slaves. This paragraph passage provides insight on how the creoles lived during the time and what kind of people they were and she goes on to describe their accents and love of music.With the concluding statement she goes on to say that they are the most irresistible creatures and yet she would not befriend one of them because she fears their stability. By which she most likely is referring to the woman who ordered her own child’s head to be cut off and by this story alone it has affected her overall view of these peoples.

“Punishment, often surpassing the human imagination in its grotesque refinements of barbarism and torture… was often the order of the day”( Fick , Making of Haiti 34)

I found this quote most significant because it depicted the brutal treatment that the slaves had encountered and what the harsh reality was for them. The actions committed to them far then human characteristics, so extreme it surpassed barbarism. Especially the fact of the matter that it states ‘ was often the order of the day’ that the slaves had to succumb to this constant brutality on a daily is what strikes me most. Which is in part of why this brought the slaves to revolt, in a harsh matter and made this revolution one of the most well known that catapulted the start of revolution amongst the western world.

The majority of the slaves were treated like ‘beasts of burden’ as if the slaves should have been grateful that they were alive. The slaves were overworked, especially during the sugar harvest working a multitude of hours that would be almost impossible for the average individual. As Carolyn Fick demonstrates, the elite white, were able to control and manipulate the social and political system to their advantage. They instilled this brutality to maintain a sense of control but within this process lost a sense of human compassion, this made them barbaric. As this absolute power that they held corrupted their sense of emotion, and compassion. This in turn resulted in the Haitian revolution and effected the world internationally.

Alexander Hamilton (1755- 1804) is one of the most interesting men from the American Revolutionary era. The man was born on the Caribbean islands of Nevis in 1755, he later moved to the island of St. Croix with his family. After this move Hamilton’s father left his family and his mother fell sick to a tropical illness that later took her. During Hamilton’s teenage years he clerked at the St. Croix office of a New York trading company, here he learned the intricacies of international commerce. During this time he was also writing for a local newspaper. Hamilton later published an account of devastating hurricane; this made him gain great popularity among his readers. He gained so much popularity that in 1772 a collection was held to send Hamilton to America to further his studies. In 1774 Hamilton enrolls at King’s College which would eventually be called Colombia, he also started participating in the colonial resistance against the British Parliament.

The American Revolution starts to come into fruition and Hamilton becomes a huge part of it. In 1776 Hamilton is commissioned as an artillery captain, only a year after that Hamilton becomes General George Washington’s chief military trade. In 1781 Hamilton leads a successful charge in the Battle of Yorktown. Later in Hamilton’s life he is called to attend a convention in order to fix the Articles of Confederation and the overall government in America. In the following years Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison publish the Federalist Papers in an attempt to ratify the constitution made at this convention. In 1789 Hamilton becomes the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. Throughout Hamilton’s years as the United States Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton gets many plans passes and bills established. Then sadly In 1804 after Hamilton and Aaron Burr get into a dispute they challenge each other to a duel, a day after that very duel Hamilton dies. Ironically 3 years prior Hamilton’s oldest son Philp dies in a duel.

Alexander Hamilton’s life is full of many great accomplishments going from an island in the Caribbean to becoming the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. His accomplishments and drive to become something more greatly resembles Robinson Crusoe in Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. In this novel Robinson doesn’t want to become another boring middle class citizen and wishes to do better and have a more exciting life on the sea sailing and discovering the world. He takes a huge risk leaving his family to have what he would deem a better life doing something that was extremely dangerous but possibly extremely rewarding. This can be related to Hamilton because you see that throughout his life Hamilton is always striving to do better and taking massive risks in order to achieve a great award. An example of such risks would be Hamilton moving to America in order to better his education and career. Another way Hamilton and Crusoe can be related to each other is where they came from and the success they achieved. For example both of them lost their parents, one chose to lose them but lost none the less, and both of them rose up from a lower class to a level of riches and success only rivaled by others who would take such risks as they or people born into the riches of their families. In closing Alexander Hamilton was a very interesting and successful man who played a huge role in the formation of America’s modern government. An entrepreneurial man who took many risks in his life in order to have a better life and create a better life for the people of his country.