River Sing Me Home

Content Warning: The source material features depictions of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, and miscarriage.

“There was hope for this new world, after all.”

The Prologue establishes the novel’s bigger picture, describing from a first-person plural perspective the impact of slavery on captive people arriving at the colonies. This quote highlights The Quest for Freedom, emphasized by its repetition in the novel’s epilogue.

“Alone, mud-streaked, with weariness sinking into her very bones, a question haunted her—Was this freedom?”

Rachel’s question foreshadows The Quest for Freedom and establishes a major conflict in the novel. Rachel, having been enslaved for the entirety of her life, does not know what freedom is supposed to feel like. She ponders variations of the question throughout the text, encountering different modes of freedom until she figures out her definition of it.

“Freedom was just another name for the life they had always lived.”

This quote adds socio-historical context to the apprenticeship system. The enslaved people on Providence Plantation, now all apprentices under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, are skeptical of the apprenticeship system, seeing no difference between it and slavery. This contextualizes why Rachel is unsure about what freedom is.