Mark L. Shurtleff

I vaguely recall studying about the Dred Scott case in history, but I didn't understand the whole story. This book is a novel based on the life of Dred Scott. The fiction format allowed the author to give voice to the characters' thoughts and emotions, which evokes powerful emotions in the readers. However, I found myself wondering how accurate the story was. There seems to be a lot of historical documentation of the case, and I might have preferred to figure out for myself how the characters were feeling. In fact, I plan to look for a nonfiction book about the case to get "just the facts." A few things in the writing I found disconcerting. The story was not in chronological order, and I found myself getting confused about what happened when. There was a lot of "information dumps" in dialogue, where characters told each other things they would have already known. It would have been easier for me to read if the information had been presented in narrative instead of dialogue. Sometimes the characters talked in dialect and sometimes they used better English. Most confusing of all was that the thoughts of different characters were given in the same scene. In one sentence, the slave is being beaten and we are reading about his pain, and a sentence or two later, we reading the hateful thoughts of the slaveowner. A story in chronological order without dialect in dialogue and without head hopping would have been easier to follow.However, the story was still very powerful. It made me ashamed of Christians who found nothing wrong with owning other human beings and in many cases treating them worse than animals.But it also gave me hope. We have gone from a ruling by the Supreme Court of the land that Negroes were less than human with no rights whatsoever to a Constitution with amendments that guarantee freedom and equal rights to blacks. We've gone from a country where a black man didn't have control over his own body or the ability to care for his family to a country that elected a black man as president. The story of Dred Scott gave me hope that one day soon we will see the same turnaround in recognizing the humanity and life of unborn children. One day Roe v. Wade will be overturned like the Dred Scott decision was overturned, and as the slaves were freed, the lives of unborn babies will be saved from murder in the womb. One day people will look back and wonder how we could stand by and allow babies to be killed, just as today we look back and wonder how people could stand by and allow black people to be enslaved.… (mer)