"We weren’t some special people who lost our magic.’’
Handful and her mother were born in slavery and they did not knew what it felt like to live as free people. Despite this, they never gave up on the idea of dying as free men. Charlotte always used to say that since she lived all her life as a slave, she will not die as a slave. Charlotte tried to convince Handful to have the same ideas by telling her stories about how they once had wings and were able to fly. Unfortunately, Handful was not as easy to convince and she did not believed that they were special people. Instead, Handful believed that they were just like any other person, worthy of being treated humanely even if they are not magical beings. The quote highlights the idea that in order for a person to deserve to be treated with dignity, they do not have to be someone special. Every human is worthy of being loved and of being appreciated and if we are to claim that only a special few deserve to be treated in a dignified way we are lying to ourselves.
“Hetty, shall I teach you to read?”
Sarah was from a young age appalled by the way in which the slaves were treated by their masters. When Sarah was given a slave as a gift, she tried to refuse her. When it became clear that she will be unsuccessful, she decided to accept the slave but to try and to free the slave. After years, Sarah realized that the society in which she lives will never allow her to free a slave and that even if the slave were to be freed, that person will never be equal to a white person. Thus, Sarah decided to free the slave in another way, by providing Handful with an education, something forbidden to slaves. When it was discovered that Handful learned how to read, she was punished by being whipped, showing thus just how much the masters wanted to keep their slaves ignorant.
"The truth," she said, "is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good.’’
For a long time, Sarah believed that no one had ambitions and that no other girl wanted to do something else with their lives instead of getting married and having children. When Sarah talked with her mother however, she found that her mother used to have dreams and ambitions as well and that someone did the same thing to her that she does to Sarah. The peculiar thing is that in both cases, the people who knocked out the ambitions out of a person genuinely believed that they were doing that for a person’s own good.
