ABSTRACT
Intersectionality proves its value as an analytical tool for interrogating how overlapping aspects of identity—race, class, gender, age, sexual orientation—and interlocking systems of power—patriarchy, law enforcement, courts, churches, schools, housing, healthcare, media—affect the human conditions of people of color. Nehemiah's attempt to outwit Dessa in a war of words, then, is like a dilettante's bringing a pocketknife to a gunfight with an expert marksman. Ashraf Rushdy rightly describes the interaction between the learned scholar and the ignorant slave as a contest between “an oppressive literacy and an emancipatory orality. A “Meditation on History,” then, in the Sherley Anne Williams sense, is a compensatory codicil to the valorized record. To meditate on history is to fill in some of the empty spaces and unknown names of the archive, repopulating the past with those whom the official story has ignored, forgotten, defamed, and left unnamed, like those insurgent slaves who died for freedom.
