ABSTRACT
In 1730, Sally Bassett, a sixty-eight-year-old black woman enslaved in Bermuda, was burned to death for allegedly poisoning the masters of her enslaved granddaughter. In 2009, in commemoration of Bermuda's four-hundred-year anniversary, Bermuda's first black local Government—the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)—erected a ten-foot-tall sculpture of Bassett in front of the Government's Cabinet Office to memorialize the struggle of blacks against slavery. The monument Spirit of Freedom (Figure 4.1), depicts Bassett as levitating above flames with her hands chained behind her back and “pregnant with freedom.” 1
