The first thing I noticed about To Be a Slave was the separation between the voices- Lester is telling the story of slavery, as many people have done, yet he uses the voices of those who are best fit to tell a story of a slave: the slaves and their children. First noticed is a visual separation; Lester's voice is in italics as he narrates the story, and the accounts themselves are in regular print. Also, Lester's voice is articulate and scholarly, while the accounts tend to keep the distinctiveness of the dialect of the slaves. (In the preface, Lester points out that he tried to preserve the language as much as possible, but had to change somethings just to make some of the statements comprehensible.)
The stories the slaves are the brick of the story and Lester's commentary is the mortar that holds these stories together.
Also, something else that I see recurring throughout the book is the slave's cries. It seems that the slave actually has two cries for the fate of a fellow, the cry of praise and the cry of sorrow, which seem to be, at first glance, contradictory, like on pages 42 and 56, respectively: The cry of praise follows the death of a child, while the cry of sorrow follows the transport of slaves even though they are still alive. This illustrates that slavery is a worse fate than death.
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It's quite interesting, Audrey, to hear you discuss the brick-and-mortar construction of this book. How else might you describe the relationship between the editor and his material?
Keep paying attention to cries as a pattern. Are there more kinds of cries? Why use the same expression--a cry--for such different feelings?
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