Dred Scott Book Author Gives SIUE Book Club Members Insights into the Man
Mary Neighbour’s book about Dred Scott, the African American illiterate slave whose 1857 Supreme Court case for freedom struck at the foundation of race and slavery in the U.S., was analyzed and praised during a Sept. 22 book club discussion at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Neighbour’s Speak Right On: Conjuring the Slave Narrative of Dred Scott was selected for the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion Fall 2017 Book Club. Renee Fussell, instructor in the Department of Applied Communication Studies, is facilitating the biweekly discussions that began Friday, Sept. 8. The book is one-fourth biography and three-fourths fiction.
The author released a second edition of the book in 2015, in part because of the racial climate in the country. The book was first released in 2006.
“I wrote the book because of how sad, perplexed and outraged I felt that we knew so little about the man behind the case,” said Neighbour. “I was in St. Louis, and I visited the Gateway Arch. They gave a history on Dred Scott.
“A man held up one piece of paper and said, ‘Everything we know about Dred Scott is on both sides of this paper.’”
The abbreviated background on the person, who Neighbour said was one of history’s most important people, became a challenge and battle cry of sorts.
“What you can’t do, can sometimes open doors to what you can do,” the author told the book club.
The writer then began to build on the little information that had been recorded about Scott. She started researching, among other things, the era that Scott lived in, the subject and various types of slavery, and Scott’s owners.
The reality, and sometimes the brutality, of slavery that is documented in the book were almost too much to bear, according to Fussell. “When I watch a film or movie about slavery, if it gets too much for me, I can always look away or walk away,” said Fussell. “But when it’s in a book, it’s there when I pick it back up again. It’s in my face.”
Book club members agreed that they liked the vividness and the tenderness in which Neighbour wrote Speak Right On.
“You wrote the book in such a way that the reader could both sympathize and empathize with the characters, reality of the times and subject matter,” said Arielle Weaver, assistant director of Community Standards in University Housing.
The author divulged that she did not just want her audience to read about slavery, but to understand it on another level.
“Imaging enslavement can lead to insights about our current state of racial relations and broaden our capacity for honest, personal connections,” Neighbour said.
The book club will continue talking about Speak Right On, on the following Fridays: Oct. 13 and 27, Nov. 3 and 17, and Dec. 1. All discussions will be from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. in the Morris University Center, Multicultural Center, room 2060.
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Mary Neighbour, is the author of Speak Right On: Conjuring the Slave Narrative of Dred Scott.
