Uncle Tom's Children Literary Elements

The book is a collection comprising of one critical essay and 5 novellas, each novella having a different plot and characters.

The action described in the novellas takes place between 1930 and 1949 in unnamed cities and villages in the south.

The novellas are told from the perspective of a third person subjective point of view. The introductory essay however is told from the perspective of a first person subjective narrator, the author wanting to transmit through this piece of writing his own personal feelings and experience.

The tone and mood in the novella “Fire and Cloud” is a violent one, the narrator describing the violent way in which the main character was killed by the white people living in the same community as he did.

The protagonists in “Bright and Morning Star” are Sue and her sons and the antagonists are the police men who kill Sue and her family.

The major conflict in “Down by the Riverside” is between the will to live and the impossibility of getting health care because of the characters’ race.

The novella “Fire and Cloud” reaches its climax when the main character, Revered Taylor, is killed by a white group of men for the simple reason he was trying to provide food for his congregation.

In “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”, the narrator describes the way in which the Jim Crow laws affected the way in which black people lived all over America. The narrator also describes the way in which these laws affected his life directly and how the laws produced him and his family a lot of pain and suffering. This description which appears in the essay at the beginning of the book can also be seen as foreshadowing the deaths of the black people described in the later novellas included in the book.

In “Big Boy Leaves Home”, the narrator describes a group of children going to a swimming whole owned by a racist white man. While there, the white man’s wife discovers the children swimming and then goes to her husband to claim the boys are trying to rape her. This is an understatement as the boys only went to the swimming whole to cool off and have fun. Still, this understatement has catastrophic consequences both for the white husband and for the black children.

In “Long Black Song” the narrator describes the husband beating his wife after finding out she was raped by a white man. The reason why the husband beats his wife remains uncertain but it may be because the narrator alludes the idea that black people had prejudiced ideas as well when it came to their white counterparts and thus the black husband was trying to express his dissatisfaction with the white people by beating his wife.

We have an important image in “Big Boy Leaves Home” at the end of the novella. At that point, some of the black children were already dead and Big Boy killef the white husband. The person left behind is Bobo who is then captured by an angry mob. To punish him, the angry mob thrown hot tar on him and eventually Bobo dies. This is a disturbing image which shows the cruelty with which the black community were treated, be it adults or children.

A paradoxical element appears in the novella “Long Black Song”. In this novella, Sarah, a black woman, is raped by a white man while her husband is away. When the husband comes back home, Sarah tells him what happed while he was gone. Paradoxically, instead of trying to help his wife, the husband beats Sarah for sleeping with another man, even though she was the victim of rape.

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The term “Jim Crow” is used in the novellas to make reference to the racial laws which tried to segregate the black community and also to make reference to the whole black community as a whole.

We find a personification in the novella “Big Boy Leaves Home” in the sentence “a train whistled mournfully”.