Sublime

enigmatical,

“[When] they kicked me off the plantation,” Hamer reportedly told a fellow worker, “they set me free.” She added, “It’s the best thing that could happen. Now I can work for my people.”43

When war came, everyone told her it was her war, and she thought so too. In South Carolina, as the war commenced, the wife of a plantation owner wrote in her diary that naturally slavery had to go, but added, “Yes, how I envy those saintly Yankee women, in their clean cool New England homes, writing to make their fortunes and to shame us.” Harriet

Peter Jacobsen, whose 1880 novel, Niels Lyhne,

then she told the story of her own experiences with state-sanctioned violence—she recounted the details of the severe beating she received in that Winona jail cell in 1963.12 As she reflected on her own painful experiences and the experiences of other Black people in the South, Hamer could not help but to “question America.” “Is this America,” she