Aminata' s slave owner
Not equal to white
Lack of Freedom
Slave owner
Plantation
I would never feel truly at home again until I found my way back to Bayo" (Hill 386)
Journey
Lost of Identity
"Without my parents, my husband, my children, what part of me was still African?
Fancy = Articulate
France's colony
Aminata's Husband
Less than men (three fifths of a person)

Aminata

Setting

1745-1805

Bayo Africa

“It’s not about whether it will do me good. It’s that I want to go home.” (418)

Slave Ship

South Carolina

British Colony

Nova Scotia

“The pain of my losses never really went away. The limbs had been severed, and they would forever after be missing. But I kept going. Somehow, I just kept going" (351)”

Other Characters

Appleby

Evil

“Bring back my baby!’ I shouted. He laughed in my face.’Bring him back!’ ‘Too late. He’s sold. Only got me five pounds, but he’s a buck, and he’ll grow and make his new master a fine profit one day.”

Chekura

Compassionate

"that evening Chekura brought a calabash of water and some soap made from shea nuts, and offered to help clean the wound on my thigh". (Hill 38) "

Intelligent

"I have never seen someone from Africa learn so fast."

Dedicated

"It was hard work, but i showed him that I learned fast and would do the job well. I had no wish to anger him"

Symbols

Books

Knowdlege

Africa

Freedom

Boat

Entrapment

“locked inside this pen” ( 93)

Racism

"'we don't serve niggers" (313)

“You talk real fancy for a nigger,” (252)

Family

Manadua, and May (Aminata's Kids)

Aminata's parents

Literary theory

Colonialism

Slavery

Sold into slavery at age of eleven

“Too late. He’s sold. Only got me five pounds” (184)

Struggle

"I lived in terror that the captors would beat us, boil us, and eat us, but they began with humiliation: they tore the clothes off our backs" ( 29).

Freedom

"a nation that said all men were created equal, but kept my people in chain" (311)

Idenity

Name changed to Meena

Minorities less than human

“Chekura was dead. Mamadu was dead. May had been gone for five years… I missed all three of my loved ones so terribly that my body, it seemed, was half missing.” (p. 370)