My birthday was last weekend, March 25th, so I apologize for the supreme tardiness of this reviews. I’m putting together a whole video on Ernestine because her storyline these season is highlighting so many struggles of Black women’s narratives throughout history and it’s important, very important. Similar to what I discussed in Beyonce’s Grammy performance and the image of Black motherhood. That Ernestine video will be up on my YouTube channel top of next week, along with a blog post because there is so much context to discuss.
Click play for the latest review and help me out with some of the questions Underground is leaving me with.
- What is Nok Aaut? That’s the title of episode four, did I miss the explanation of that title?
- How did Cato end up in England? It’s funny because the sewing circle mentions their pending rally and meetup with the “John Brown boys.” There’s two John Browns from the same period, John Brown the insurgent white abolitionist. Then John Brown, a runaway slave who sailed to London and dictated a book about his experience as a slave.
- What year are we in? First Daniel reads an article from the paper that quotes the fictitious Ain’t I Woman speech by Sojourner Truth. Fictitious because that speech was published as a “remembered” by white feminist abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage in 1863, twelve years after Sojourner gave a speech to 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention. Fun fact, it’s debunked because Gage wrote it in a Southern dialect, when Sojourner was a slave from rural New York state whose first language was Dutch. The African American southern accent is an amalgamation of West African cultures that blended together on plantations with the English language, as seen in the scenes on the South Carolina plantation holding Ernestine.
- Did Rosalee play dead, allowing her to be buried alive under all that hay? How she hold her breath and keep not only her chest but pregnant belly from moving? I know I missed something with that set up and then she somehow crawls her way through the tunnels of the sewing circles house? Wheew child, she is a survivor.
- That Angela Bassett cameo threw me for a loop! Lol, I blinked like that Angela?!
What were your thoughts of the past two episodes? And what important themes do you think Cato, Rosalee, Noah and Ernestine highlight? Who’s ready to see John Legend as Fredrick Douglass?
