[Second post today! I'm liking being back here.]
This morning I wrote some lines for a (non-existent) Black character I suggest be added to the hip-hop musical Hamilton:
["air quotes", quoting Hamilton]
"I'm opposed to slavery,
it's so very degrading."
But he was wavery––
lacked the bravery?
When it was time to shine,
his fervor was fading.
"Slavery is odious," so he said,*
But when it was time to rise,**His words stayed home in bed.
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Jeez, if I can toss this off,
imagine what Lin-Manuel Miranda could've written for such a character!
Footnotes:
*"The abandonment of negroes, who had been promised freedom, to bondage
and slavery, would be odious and immoral, and as such cannot be presumed
to have been intended. "
––Philo Camillus No. 2, [7 August 1795], by Alexander Hamilton, writing as “Philo Camillus”,
founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-19-02-0010
**Rise up is a repeated phrase in the song "My Shot", sung by the young Hamilton.
But...
"Evidently, Hamilton abandoned his youthful Revolutionary-era antislavery idealism and became indifferent toward the cause of abolition." --via
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Maybe the character could be named Peggy, an enslaved woman listed as sold in Hamilton's account books (below)--and mirroring the name of one of his sisters in law, Peggy Schuyler.
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