arts & entertainment
‘Solutions’
New Account of America’s
Antebellum South and the Aftermath
By kam williams
Special to The Skanner
News
PHOtO BY SUSaN FrIED
A
local writer and mental health survivor Tyrone
Waters has published a new zine called
“Solutions.” The tiny handbook is a grab-bag of
how-to’s, positive thoughts and lifestyle ideas. he
says the project was suggested to him by a
California department of corrections officer who
felt there aren’t enough books offering solutions
to people experiencing problems in their
everyday lives. The zine is available at Powell’s
on Burnside and Reflections Coffee and Books on
North Killingsworth Street.
conventional wisdom in
much the same way that the
late Howard Zinn painted an
empathetic picture from the
point-of-view of blacks,
women, Native-Americans
and other oppressed groups
in A People’s History of the
United States.
Here, for example, Neal
cites freedman Richard
Macks’
witnessing
a
merican
history
books typically sug-
gest
that
most
Africans were docile and
that slave revolts like the
one led by Nat Turner were
rare occurrences on planta-
tions. But truth be told,
escapes, resistance
and insurrections
were the rule rather
than the exception,
Unburdened by
given the whip-
conscience
pings, rapes and
A
Black People’s
other forms of tor-
Collective Account of
ture
routinely
employed by own-
America’s Antebellum
ers and overseers to
South and the Aftermath
keep their chattel in
by Anthony W. Neal
line.
Unburdened by
Conscience sets the
record straight by relying on Maryland slave auction
narratives and journals kept where a mulatto female cas-
by ex-slaves rather than on trated her new master when
academic texts which never he attempted to molest her.
bothered to consider the A similar case is recounted
African-American experi- by ex-slave Charity Morris
ence. Compiled by Boston- whose pregnant cousin
based attorney Anthony W. Sallie cracked her master
Neal, the book represents a over the head with a fire-
refreshing alternative to the place poker in return for
having repeatedly raped
her. Sadly, Salllie was
soon convicted of mur-
der, although not execut-
ed until the baby was
born.
A sobering opus belat-
edly shedding light on a
shameful chapter of our
cultural legacy.
“While pursuing my
Bachelor of Arts
degree in college,
I took a lot of his-
tory
courses
[which] offered an
essentially
unapologetic,
Southern view of
American
slavery
[as] a benign institu-
tion. They focused
primarily on the
slaveholders, whom
they euphemistically
called
‘Southern
planters.’
Each historian chose dif-
ferent words to convey [the
same] message about the
slave owners: The majority
of Southern planters were
good people who were
morally concerned about
the welfare of their slaves…
As I read those textbooks, it
dawned on me that I was
not the intended audience.
After completing my
assigned reading, I har-
bored a deep resentment
because I believed I had
been required to read prop-
aganda for academic cred-
it… In trying to humanize
the slaveholders, most of
those historians were leav-
ing out an indispensable
part of the record… black
people’s perspective.
Determined to present
slavery from their point of
view… I offer this book as
the product of that effort.”
— From the Preface
July 6, 2011 The Portland Skanner Page 5