SPEECH



(Esther speaks in a group of slaves)

The Brookgreen Plantation. The place of my birth. Where I grew up. The place where I birthed both of my children. Yet it was never really home. I’ve wanted a real home all of my life. To own something and have it be truly yours. Heck, I didn’t even own my children. Col. Joshua John Ward owned my children. He owned them yet he never met them. Both of my sons worked in the rice fields. The master was too good to ever visit the fields. Forty kilometers of rice he owned yet he never touched a single grain of it. All of the grueling work my two sons and the other slaves did, the master got credit for it.

That’s why I am here today. I want my sons to get credit for the work they do. I want all of you to get credit for the work you do. The only way to get that accomplished is to try. We have to rebel. We need to call them out on their actions. If all else fails at least we tried. And we are strong enough to bear the lash. The consequences seem as though they are nothing compared to the reward of the victory.

Being one of one thousand, one hundred and thirty slaves gives you a lot of people to converse with. I’ve heard many old tales of the field slaves. Many of you have told me these tales yourself. They did not truly affect me until I encountered a real life experience with my own eyes. About mid-spring of about ten years ago I was walking to the river to retrieve the laundry for the master. I witnessed a slave named Johnny kneeling down. His face scrunched up screaming in agony. His eyes tortured and vacant. It wasn’t long until I noticed the overseer behind him. With every extension of his arm, the pain in his face deepening with every thrash. The whip cracked and made contact with his dark flesh. I must have stood there through fifteen or so cracks of the whip doing nothing. But what could I do? If I attempted to stop that overseer there would've been two of us getting a whipping instead of one. And what good would that have done? One young, weak black woman against a strong, white male overseer, I don’t think I could have won that fight. But with every fiber in my being, I wish I would've tried. I should have just stood up and started fighting. I should have fought until all of my muscles ached and burned. I should have tried. And we gotta try right?

Of all of the awful things I saw that day, by far the worse was the look on that overseers face. A look of pleasure. He was enjoying this. That disgusts me. The fact that he took pleasure from another man’s pain is truly appalling. Do we ever want that to happen again? No, we do not.

As a girl, I sat and tended to every need of Ms. Georgianna Ward. That brat demanded everything. She treated me as her property. I was hers and no one elses. It was as if I was a dog she could just order around. That feeling was the worst of all. The one of just having no freedom. Being completely and utterly an object. That feeling is a mutual feeling throughout every slaves body. A common thread connecting all of us. This feeling can either tear us apart or bring us together. The feeling can break us and torture us until there is nothing left. Or it can pull us together. Start a revolution. Light the fire that fuels our passion to be free. We can pull together and change the world.
Gather up all of your matches, pitchforks, and shovels. Tonight we will set fire to the barn and rebel. Join me now!