Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. What are the "haints," and how do they rule the lives of the townspeople? How is it that they both adhere to the same religious beliefs? In other woerds, how does Christianity serve the purposes of blacks and whites?ĩ. Religion figures prominently in Conjure Woman, for both slaves and their masters. Describe the relationship, post war, between Rue and Varina? How has their power relation changed? Or has it?Ĩ. Talk about Bean? What does he represent to the community? Why does he so unnerve the townspeople?ħ. How does she learn to navigate the post-slavery world? In what way has her mother prepared her for the way the world has changed?Ħ. Rue is one of the figures at the center of this story. Do you think she succeeded? How does her novel differ-or does it?-from others set during the Civil War era, and after?ĥ. Have you read other works in the genre referred to as "slave novels," which creates, as Atakora puts it, "art from a legacy of horror." Atakora wanted her story to move beyond the "legacy of whippings" to consider what the years were like after the war and before the dawn of Jim Crow. Do you, in our own life, have a sense of history all around you, of being present in a moment of time in which actions will echo down into the future?Ĥ. Atakora refers to Rue as "one lone person in a vast history who does not think of herself as part of history at all, who has no knowledge of the ramifications of the world changing around her." In other words, Rue lives her life, day by day. To what extent are our own present issues tied to the very theme of a past that never dies in Conjure Women?ģ.
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