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Summary Of Lemon Swamp And Other Places By Karen Fields

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Karen Fields presents a plethora of “stories” or oral recollections of history posited by her grandmother for inclusion in a memoir titled Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir. These “stories” as Grandmother Fields calls them provide us with insights into what life was like for a black person in Charleston, South Carolina during the era of Jim Crow in the South. The act of remembering the past, those memories that individuals hold with them as they travel through life, provides us with an encapsulated view of what living was like to them for a specific period. However, these “stories” are not substantial enough to understand the complexities of history in its entirety on its own. Oral histories and personal recollections vary between …show more content…

This internal warfare can be analyzed through the story of Mrs. Burden. The story of Mrs. Burden is quite interesting to analyze concerning understanding relations during the Jim Crow South. In this story, Grandmother Fields has an older pupil named Mrs. Burden, a military widow, desiring to learn to sign her name. This story teaches the reader about small, personal battles against the politics of Jim Crow. This story relates to “The Destruction of Slavery, 1861-1865” in the way that it emphasizes the personal nature of combatting against forces meant to keep one at a disadvantage to the other. “The Destruction of Slavery, 1861-1865” acknowledges the nature and efforts of slaves to acquire liberation for themselves through personal actions, such as running away and refusing to work, during the Civil War. This is similar to the liberation that Mrs. Burden sought to be able to write her name in the presence of white

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