While an essential theme of The Last Silk Dress is the corrupting consequences of slavery, its sympathetic stance towards the Civil War South may give readers a one-sided view of the war, which should be balanced with another point of view, such as To Be a Slave by Julius Lester (1968). Then a student, who might feel compassion towards the Confederacy and its white children, might also hear the voices of its black slaves. As it stands alone, The Last Silk Dress is nearly devoid of African-American experience, and so the horrors of slavery cannot be felt in an immediate way by the reader: One feels more for the dying boys and for the girl who is abused by her mother than for the repressed slaves. The one black character, Rhody, is not an important figure.....
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