What Should Life Be Like for a Black Person in America?

What Should Life Be Like for a Black Person in America?

How Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels turned an enslaved man’s narrative into an opera

“How Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels turned an enslaved man’s narrative into an opera”

As a young man, my own history was shaped by the life of a slave. Though I had never seen one, in fact, I had been in the same situation as many white people I knew, who had been bought and then enslaved. I had also been in the situation of a young woman who was sold by a relative who left her father to take her to a man who promised her a life of freedom.

I know this history well. For me, it helped make my experience as a white woman who was enslaved as an equal in a way that it might not for a black person. The world I grew up in was different. I grew up in a time before slavery was legal. Before I was told to understand the world, I had to imagine it. I often wrote stories in the margins of school books as a way of making sense. As an eight-year-old, I would write my own stories of the slave world.

While the stories were, for me, a way of making sense, I would also think about what they might mean for the way I would experience life as a black woman in America. What should life be like for a black person in America? Where should a black person look for meaning?

When I was a teenager and writing stories, I imagined being free and living in a world where everyone lived in peace and harmony. I imagined a world where the white race were not dominant in the world, and where minorities could be free to enjoy their differences and find acceptance. I imagined a world in which slavery was not an option.

I did not realize that would never be a reality.

On November 30th, 1851, a slave trader named Henry Clay passed through Natchez, Mississippi. He brought a girl with him. On his ship, he did not specify what the girl’s role would be

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