Analysis Of Celia A Slave

Celia, A Slave written by Melton A. McLaurin tells vivid accounts of a woman slave’s life. The author intrigues the reader by going into detail about a hard time of her life, a time that she was being molested, raped, murder, and eventual execution. The author was able to go in chronological order of her life with the help of court records and newspaper articles from Callaway County, Missouri during the 19th century.
This book portrayed a very controversial story because slavery was a major issue and often separated people based on how they viewed slavery. Because different people viewed slavery in many different ways of course Celia’s story would be interpreted many different ways. All women no matter if she were a slave or white would analyze

The outcome of Celia’s trial was influenced by a court system that was trying to reconcile slavery consequences along with existing moral codes and politics. There were two accounts of how the murder could have happened, “The first account of the murder that Newsom was grabbing for her and she hit him once more out of fear, which then killed him. The second account, and the more likely of the two, was, “as soon as I struck him the Devil got into me, and I struck him with the stick until he was dead, then rolled him in the fire and burnt him up (McLaurin, p135)” (123 helpme). Once Newsom’s family realized that he was missing a search began and when no body could be found, they turned to the slaves, and Celia confessed to the

The author uses Celia’s story to raise issues about American slavery as a whole, the book forces the reader to acknowledge the extenuating circumstances that slavery drove its victims to doing actions that were unthinkable otherwise. The book also showed how the meaning of crime was confusing, it was terrible being a female slave that had no rights to her own body. Although the United States have come a long way from slavery, we still have a long way to go where people can begin to feel no prejudices, which will probably never happen. Unfortunately, racism still exist and is still a major issue in culture and politics, it has taken a back seat to intellect and