| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: criticisms that we make upon other nations, only call forth
ridicule, contempt, and scorn. In a word, we are made a reproach
and a by-word to a <347>mocking earth, and we must continue to be
so made, so long as slavery continues to pollute our soil.
We have heard much of late of the virtue of patriotism, the love
of country, &c., and this sentiment, so natural and so strong,
has been impiously appealed to, by all the powers of human
selfishness, to cherish the viper which is stinging our national
life away. In its name, we have been called upon to deepen our
infamy before the world, to rivet the fetter more firmly on the
limbs of the enslaved, and to become utterly insensible to the
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: doan like yams. Wade hungwy."
The others grumbled, too:
"Miss Scarlett, 'ness I gits mo' to eat, I kain nuss neither of
these chillun."
"Miss Scarlett, ef Ah doan have mo' in mah stummick, Ah kain split
no wood."
"Lamb, Ah's perishin' fer real vittles."
"Daughter, must we always have yams?"
Only Melanie did not complain, Melanie whose face grew thinner and
whiter and twitched with pain even in her sleep.
"I'm not hungry, Scarlett. Give my share of the milk to Dilcey.
Gone With the Wind |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: fanciful, for mantelpieces. No apothecary would have deemed
himself in the way of obtaining custom without setting up a
gilded mortar, if not a head of Galen or Hippocrates, from the
skilful hand of Drowne.
But the great scope of his business lay in the manufacture of
figure-heads for vessels. Whether it were the monarch himself, or
some famous British admiral or general, or the governor of the
province, or perchance the favorite daughter of the ship-owner,
there the image stood above the prow, decked out in gorgeous
colors, magnificently gilded, and staring the whole world out of
countenance, as if from an innate consciousness of its own
Mosses From An Old Manse |
