Research Paper on:
Charles Joyner's Down by the Riverside A South Carolina Slave Community

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
the United States. More attention has been paid to various areas of the country and how they dealt with slavery, and more attention has been paid to slave narratives, narratives  which, more often than not, gives us a very intelligent look at the conditions many people faced. "Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community" by Charles Joyner is  a book about a specific community, and one that provides us with several different narratives. In this book we are provided with a number of intriguing perspectives, not the least  of which is that which looks at how the individuals changed and altered from an African culture to an African American culture. In the following paper we provide a brief  summary of the book as well as an analysis. Down By The Riverside In the very beginning of the book, with Chapter I "Down by the Riverside," we  are given a very simple, yet powerful, look at arriving in a new land as we are given insight into traveling and the exposure to a cities. As the ship,  the Nina, approached one region, the author states the following, giving us just one of many glimpses into the diversity of the country that is the United States as it  involves slavery: "Here, too, there developed a slave society that more nearly resembled Caribbean than other mainland societies. In fact, in everything but the strictest geographic sense, the rice coast  of South Carolina might be considered the northernmost of the British West Indies" (Joyner 13). Unfortunately, as was the case with much of the industry of agriculture in the  country, "The unpleasant truth is that there could hardly have been successful rice culture in South Carolina without the strength and skills of enslaved Africans....This common dependence on their slaves