Mabel Questions And Answers

1) In what ways did Mabel influence Cora’s escape? Why would Cora run away like her mother did if Cora hates her mother for abandoning her to a life of captivity? Is it accurate to say that running away and pursuing freedom is her family's inheritance? Mabel’s departure years prior influenced Cora’s decision to escape because she had nothing left at the plantation. Cora owned nothing but a garden plot, and even that she didn’t truly own. Unlike her mother, however, she also had no one that she would be leaving behind if she escaped. Cora followed in her mother’s footsteps despite hating her for her actions because Cora was in a better situation than Mabel. Cora hated Mabel because she left a young and innocent child behind, therefore consigning

It would be inaccurate to state that running away and pursuing freedom was her family’s inheritance because stating that discounts Mabel’s true ending and Ajarry’s suffering. Ajarry was torn from her family and her home before she was enslaved. Her legacy became a small garden and a daughter. She died in the cotton fields and it is remarked in the book that “Liberty was reserved for other people… Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised,” (8). Despite what she owned, Ajarry still died without her dignity and without hope. Later in the novel, Cora comes to a realization stating that the garden was “a tiny square of dirt that had convinced her she owned something,” (184). Ajarry’s pride and joy, her lifeline, was really nothing but a distraction. It seemed like a small piece of freedom but was really just dirt that covered up the truth. In addition, Mabel’s escape was similarly misconstrued by Cora. Following her escape, Mabel didn’t even make it past the property line before she sustained a snake bite and died. Mabel never reached freedom. Instead, she died yearning and

Unlike Cora and Mabel, Ajarry knew freedom before she was enslaved. Additionally, she had to go through the process of being “appraised and reappraised” again and again, which her daughter and granddaughter did not. Slavery in general is incredibly dehumanizing, and the institution itself relies on dehumanizing black people. One of the most disheartening parts of the process was being sold and having a price tag attached to a person. After Ajarry was kidnapped, she “was sold a few times on the trek to the fort…. in Ouidah… she was a part of a bulk purchase, eighty-eight human souls for sixty crates of rum and gun powder,” (3). Being treated as a lesser being, as something equivalent in value to rum and gun powder, is enough to lose all hope, and Ajarry had to go through it not once but multiple times. After her experiences of being kidnapped and sold, Ajarry began to view regaining her freedom as impossible. Whitehead states that Ajarry now had “new blankness behind her eyes,” (7). Ajarry recognized that the white people would never let her go and that, in America, freedom didn’t exist for people like her. In opposition, Cora and Mabel believed that freedom was possible because they had never left the plantation. Both of them knew nothing about the outside world and therefore saw freedom as something absolute that they could achieve. While Cora and Mabel ran away