There are three more Biblical quotations in this single short chapter.
Edmonds says:
"'"Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves..."'" etc (Romans 12:19) (p. 270)
He follows this by dreading God's punishment:
"'...of this sinful land, when it comes.'" (ibid.)
Is this an auctorial comment? Have subsequent national tribulations constituted divine punishment? Or, in nontheistic language, reciprocal consequences of earlier injustices?
Edmonds reads:
"'"...And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people..."'" etc (Exodus 3:7-9) (p. 271)
Politically relevant on a world scale now.
Flora responds:
"'Let ma people go...'" (Exodus 9:1) (ibid.)
Readers might miss this but Flora's phrase is also a quotation.
She tells the Edmonds how old she is. (If this did not happen, then Chapter XIII would be pointless within the novel.) They think that her ordeal has made her lose her wits. Thus, the secret of immortality is kept. A slave owner, disturbed by her longevity, would sell her on, "down de ribber," (p. 271) without alerting the buyer to her oddness. Thus, even her oppressors colluded in keeping the secret.
Flora addresses Edmonds as "'...massa...,'" (p. 270) then, when she is corrected, "'...suh...'" (p. 271)
Edmond's language is so Biblically influenced that it can sound like quotations, e.g.:
"No, please, God, of Thy mercy, no. Withhold Thy wrath that we have so richly earned. Lead us to Thy light." (p. 273)
The Edmonds, good people by (almost) anyone's standards, appear only in this single chapter. They are like timebound helpers of Jack Havig's group in There Will Be Time.
We used to run a food thread here. The Edmonds serve Flora:
18 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And some people also fear there will be divine punishment of the US because of horrors like "legalized" abortion since Roe vs. Wade in 1973. The massacre of 50 million infants since then dwarfs the atrocity of slavery!
I admit the meal offered to Flora by the Edmonds would be rather overwhelming to me. (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We can vicariously enjoy the food as well as everything else.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
True, and Old Nick would enjoy it both vicariously and for real!
Ad astra! Sean
Note that slavery was a ubiquitous human institution until historically quite recently. Western Europe in the 13th century was the first large area not to have slavery even as a peripheral institution; Japan abolished it in 1590.
Prior to those, it was everywhere, to a greater or lesser degree. Eg., in Domesday Book, 15% of the population of England are registered as chattel slaves. In some areas in the western part of England, it was up to 25%.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I know the Church disapproved of slavery, but there must also have been practical reasons why slavery died out. Free tenant farmers was a more efficient means of managing land than using slaves/serfs?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Was that not also the issue in the American Civil War? Free workers are more productive than slaves?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
By 1860 slavery was grossly inefficient, but I have to go now.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: actually, no, it was highly efficient, for the owners. 2/3 of all Americans worth more than $100,000 -- equivalent to about $20 million now -- were southern slaveowners in 1860.(**). More than half the exports of the US were slave-raised.
The primary economic effect of emancipation was to make the South more dependent on outside sources of food -- agriculture became more specialized(*) -- and to shift the locus of profit from the landowners to the merchants and cotton manufacturers.
(*) land was cheap in the pre-Civil War south, and planters had to keep enough slaves to -harvest- their cotton. That gave them a surplus of labor most of the agricultural year, so it made sense to have them raise their own food -- most plantations produced a surplus of food crops and livestock, outside a few sugar-growing zones. Slaveowners did not like their slaves sitting idle.
After emancipation, the landowners could hire labor or use sharecroppers and didn't have the same incentives. Seasonal unemployment became much more common.
(**) large-scale agriculture in the North wasn't practical except in some special circumstances because the rural labor market was 'thin' -- there was no large group of landless laborers. If you wanted to get more than middle-class comfort at the price of very hard work, you moved to town or went in for speculation.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected! I thought technological advances was making slavery more and more costly and inefficient. Rather like the situation faced by Roman landowners in your TO TURN THE TIDE, where they ran the risk of many slaves being idle after harvest.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: nobody invented a cotton-picking machine until the late 1920's, because it was technically rather difficult. Wheat-harvesting machines came in during the 1830's -- and, incidentally, slave plantations raising wheat in Virginia and North Carolina were early, substantial purchasers of those harvesters. They solved a major problem, which was getting enough labor at the harvest.
By then in N. America the cradle-scythe had replaced the sickle; that happened in the late 18th century.
You can do .25 of an acre in a day with a sickle, 2-3 acres with a cradle scythe, and 15 acres with an early McCormick reaper.
In other words, a cradle scythe increases labor productivity by x8-x10, and a reaper by x60.
Sugar planters in Louisiana often hired immigrant workers for drainage projects -- clearing swamp forest and digging ditches was dangerous work, and slaves were expensive, while a dead German or Irishman was a loss only to himself.
In the 1830's, one planter tried hiring Irish and German immigrants for the sugar harvest.
It worked fine... until they went on strike in the middle of the harvest.
He had to pay through the nose to get all his sugar in, and swore off hired labor.
That's the problem with hiring agricultural workers for the harvest.
Unless they're plentiful (and hence docile and cheap) they have you by a very sensitive place, because harvesting is -extremely- time-dependent. You have to get it done -fast- or you lose the entire year's investment of time and labor.
Note that the end of sharecropping in the US South came with cotton-picking machines.
The landowners turned off the sharecroppers (many of whom moved north for factory work) and replaced them with machinery. There were already plenty of machines for -planting- and -weeding- cotton, but the crucial thing was harvesting.
Cotton farms (the units of production, not ownership) in the US went from small (mostly sharecroppers) to quite large in a single generation. By the 1950's, sharecroppers were a dwindling minority.
Thank you very much.
Another time-dependent product is a daily newspaper. A 24-hour strike destroys it completely!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ditto, what Paul! Your comments here and TO TURN THE TIDE makes very plain the worries and problems of landowners. Meaning they too had legitimate points of view.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: farming -is- worry... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I saw a lot of that in your book! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I picked that up partly by research, and partly by contacts with farmers, including relatives.
In my latest the ranch-raised lead character notes that he still has his grandfather's habit of casting an eye skyward at the weather and saying:
"And if the damn crik don't rise".
Which his grandfather must have picked up from -his- grandfather, because it's the sort of thing you worry about in much wetter places than West Texas.
But anxiety about the weather (and things like crop prices) is absolutely ubiquitous among farmers.
How anyone came up with the idea of a rural idyll is a mystery -- they certainly didn't get it from the people who actually -do- agriculture.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Poul Anderson would agree! His boyhood on a farm his mother tried to run disabused him of twaddle about "rural idylls."
Ad astra! Sean
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