Genre: Realistic or Historical Fiction; Chapter Book
This book was a diary of Patsy who was a young black slave girl that lived on Davis Plantation in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The diary began in April 1865. She had been brought to the plantation with a group of slaves that had been purchased but none of the slaves in that group seemed to have been her parents. Most slaves worked in the fields and were assigned to the field. Only a few were assigned to The House. Patsy was in The House but did not think she was special because she had to take care of Annie and Charles who were her Master’s brother’s children and she also was a helper that carried water or helped the Cook, laundress and cleaner. Patsy walked with a limp so she was slow at chores. She also stuttered when she spoke so she was very quiet most of the time and everyone thought she was slow or dimwitted. Annie and Charles would play school with Patsy and pretend to teach but they called Patsy the dunce and said that she couldn’t learn. But, in fact, Patsy was learning. When Annie and Charles’ teacher came to teach them to read, Patsy would sit in the room pretending to dust or act like she didn’t understand, but she did and Patsy learned to read this way but kept it a secret. When the North won the Civil War, the slaves were freed. But the slaves didn’t feel free because there were rules about not having work or a place to stay so most slaves were forced to stay with their owners for minimum pay. With the changes from slavery to freedom, Patsy was able to let the other former slaves on the plantation know she could read and she began to feel important as she read the newspapers to the other slaves and began to teach the others to read. As the former slaves were leaving the plantation, she wrote about how she felt when each family that left. By January 1866, she was able to get the education she wanted and she returned to Mars Bluff to teach and married one of the other former slaves she had mentioned in her diary entries. When the slaves were freed, they had to find a last name and most slaves had taken their Master’s last name. Patsy decided to replace her name with Phyllis Frederick because each name was a former slave that wanted to read and became writers.
I would use this book as an assigned book to read over a few weeks. I would have the class read the Epilogue first, and go over this information first. I would have the class draw a timeline or fact chart outlining what was happening at this time from the Epilogue and refer to it while reading the days in the diary. I think this would make it easier for the class to understand what Patsy was thinking and help students understand what was happening at the end of the Civil War. This book would be a great book to read while in the Civil War unit during social studies/history.
No comments:
Post a Comment