Essay Questions

Explain the title of the novel.

The novel is entitled “Uncle Tom’s Children” and the title of the novel is based on the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, an anti-slavery novel published almost 100 years prior. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was written by the activist Harriet Beecher who fought all her life to abolish slavery. The original novel described the appalling conditions in which slaves lived and the way in which slaves lived. The novel is considered today as being the novel which influenced millions of people to join the anti-slavery movement and is considered to this day to be the book which helped pave the way to the Civil War. By the time when “Uncle Tom’s Children” was written, slavery was already abolished but the black people were still suppressed through the Jim Crow laws and by the general racist views of the time. Thus, just as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” presented the lives of the slaves and the suffering they had to go through, “Uncle Tom’s Children” explores the lives of the first generation of free blacks born in America and the way in which they still suffered as a result of racism and prejudice.

How was the life of the narrator influenced by the Jim Crow laws?

The introductory essay entitled “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” analyzes the way in which the lives of the black people living in the post-slavery era were far from being easy and far from being equal to the lives of the white people around them. The life of the narrator was affected by the Jim Crow Laws, a series of laws passed at a state and local level and which had the purpose of segregating the white people from the black people. These laws were primarily implemented in the Southern states of America but they influenced the whole country in one way of another. The narrator felt the effect of these laws from his childhood when he was forced to attend schools built only for black people and to live in segregated communities. As he grew up, he was able to see how black people continued to be abused by their white counterparts and how blacks were often blamed for everything that went wrong even though they were completely innocent. This type of injustice is also present in the novellas, the narrator presenting a large range of black people suffering without being guilty or just because they were protecting themselves and their families.

What are some of the ways through which the black characters are killed?

In every novella in the collection, one or two black characters are eventually killed by white mobs. The most common way through which the black characters are killed is by being shot. This appears in “Big Boy Leaves Home”, in “Down by the Riverside”, “Long Black Song” and “Bright and Morning Star”. These methods of execution are humane when compared with the other ways in which some black characters found their end. In “Big Boy Leaves Home” for example, a boy is killed by having tar poured all over him and in “Long Black Song” Silias is burned alive in his own home while his wife watches from a distant. All these methods of killing are described in extremely brutal ways and are shown as affecting the family of the person killed more than the person who had to suffer before his death. These descriptions also show the brutality which the black community had to endure and how they were more than often powerless to stop it from taking place.