Although I purchased some current books for my Kobo ereader, it also came with a selection of free classics to download. I’m currently reading one I’ve always meant to get around to: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London isn’t very far from the heritage site of the same name located in Dresden. It commemorates the life and times of Reverend Josiah Henson, a slave who escaped Maryland and established himself in Canada. He provided shelter and a new life for many others who wanted such simple things like a piece of their own land and the right to be free. He was the inspiration for the book, written in 1852, that Abraham Lincoln said was a catalyst for the American Civil War.
The prose is excessively wordy and the slang is sometimes a bit confusing on the first pass but it’s so fascinating, I can see why this book has endured. Among many other things, it lets you be a fly on the wall when two ignorant slave-owners muse about why a young, female slave should “carry on so” just because her son was sold while she was out in the field – it’s astonishing that people could have ever been so stupid. There were also those who cared and treated their slaves well and almost like family. But as much as it pained them to do it even those Masters and Mistresses sold their “family” when a debt needed to be paid. It was an awful period in human history. It truly makes me want to weep like I did during scenes of the miniseries Roots when it first aired, knowing that it wasn’t fiction.
I’d like to think that I would have been different had I lived in that time but one can never really know. And I suppose that’s the worst part of it, isn’t it?