Second Daughter: The Story of a Slave Girl - Hardcover

Walter (Mississippi Challenge) treats fiction as the handmaiden of history and politics in this fact-based story, drawing from research about Mum Bett, a Massachusetts slave who successfully sued for her freedom shortly after the Revolutionary War. For a narrator Walter chooses Mum Bett's sister, whose name and life story have gone unrecorded. The author gives her the African name Aissa, which means "Second Daughter"; a self-satisfied, capricious mistress; a strong temperament; and an indomitable will to be free. Aissa charts the injustices as she watches her more accommodating older sister, Bett, serve men who spout Revolutionary rhetoric about liberty with no thought to the humans they treat as property. Bett's husband, a free man, is killed fighting in the Revolution, but the pension Bett receives is nowhere near enough to buy their child's freedom. In common with many other heroines reclaimed from oblivion, Bett is also a skilled folk healer. It's a story of perfect political rectitude, but the agenda here is stronger than the narrative?judging from the intriguing historical note at the end of the book, its lessons might have been even more clearly delivered as nonfiction. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 6^-10. The history is dramatic: in 1781 a slave woman, Mum Bett, took her owner to court and won her freedom under the Massachusetts Constitution. Her story is told in the voice of her fictional younger sister, Aissa, who describes the events leading up to that historic trial--what it was like to be a slave, to be sold away from home, to work for someone who saw you only as property, to hide your true self. The plot meanders, and the characterization is thin: through Aissa's eyes, people are pretty much saints or villains, though the author does show that Bett holds on to a strong sense of her inner worth. What readers will respond to are the facts of Bett's life and the bitter truth of the young slave's commentary. For the powerful leaders who are fighting the Revolutionary War and hammering out the Constitution, the sisters are invisible. As the action builds to the climax of the trial, Aissa raises the elemental question: if the great new Constitution says that all men are created equal, does "men" include black men and all women? Hazel Rochman