Before the fourteenth amendment was adopted in 1868, slaves were not considered citizens and had no legal rights. But violence against and prejudicial treatment of African Americans continued, and even escalated, after slavery was abolished and they were given the right to vote.
In Billy Rabbit: An American Adaptation, Ann Tyler conflates the horrific history of lynching in America with an English cautionary tale for children. Images of tools – saws, knives, a hammer, carrying the patina of age – are sewn to some of the pages, partially covering the text. To expose the entire story, the reader is impelled to lift the image, becoming something of a symbolic accessory to the crime revealed beneath. |
The beautifully crafted book is painful to read. Tyler used actual newspaper accounts of lynchings and wove those elements into the story of the innocent Billy Rabbit and the appalling injustice he suffers at the hands of a mob.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an African-American journalist, suffragist and anti-lynching crusader, said “The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce.” Tyler explicitly and unflinchingly interprets this shameful chapter in American history. |
