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Melton Mclaurin's Celia, A Slave

432 Words2 Pages
Celia, A Slave presents the story of a young slave woman, who in dealing with an abusive master, was pushed to her limit. Melton McLaurin uses this tragic story to illustrate a certain aspect of the institution of slavery. That aspect was the relationship between white masters and their female slaves. This drives McLaurin to discuss the morality of the slave society. Celia’s story offers a powerful insight into the lack of morals in the slave system. McLaurin writes that “the life of Celia demonstrates how slavery placed individuals, black and white, in specific situations that forced them to make and act upon personal decisions of a fundamentally moral nature” (xiii). This provides the overview of what Celia endured and the actions she took,
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Let us begin with George, Celia’s understandably treacherous slave lover, and his unreasonable demands that set Celia’s case into motion. George’s actions are an example of the common frustration and desperation of slave men who had no control over the sexual abuse of their loved ones by white masters (McLaurin 139-140). His was a reaction to a smoldering attack upon his masculinity, an attack that was a direct result of the dehumanization upon which slavery rested. Because the South was a slave society, this master-slave relationship structure echoed throughout every other aspect of southern life (Faragher, 204 & 215). In Celia’s case, we see this truth through Virginia and Mary Newsom’s position of powerlessness.

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