Copper Sun

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2006

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Chapters 23-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part Five: Amari

Chapter 23 Summary: Fiery Pain and Healing Hands

Amari revives from the severe whipping. “For three days she hovered between the darkness and the light” (149). She awakens to find Polly nursing her wounds. Amari remembers that Mr. Derby ordered her to work in the rice fields, and their plan to avoid this is to quietly heal out of sight in the hopes that he will forget the order. Mrs. Derby comes to visit Amari daily, apologizing for how Mr. Derby treated her.

Teenie, while visiting her, tells Amari that she has a strong spirit. Amari says “Sometimes spirit die” (154).

Chapter 24 Summary: Gator Bait

Clay comes into Teenie’s house and takes Tidbit; he says he’s going to be needing “gator bait” this afternoon and Tidbit is the perfect size. Clay orders Amari to come along as well because he wants his “friends to see what [he] got for his birthday” (156). Teenie begs Clay to leave Tidbit alone.

When they arrive at the river, one of Clay’s friends harasses Amari. Clay jumps between them, shouting to his friend that Amari is his possession. “Amari couldn’t understand why Clay acted as if he was proud of her, showing her off to his friends” (159). Clay and his friends tie a rope to Tidbit and toss him into the river. When a gator swims up close, they will shoot it. Tidbit thrashes “hysterically, his tiny face wild with fear” (159). The ordeal is terrifying for Amari as she has to witness the psychological torture that Tidbit is enduring. He is thrown into the water as bait four times. However, he survives, and they made their way back home.

Chapters 23-24 Analysis

Just when the reader assumes that the slave’s situation at Derbyshire Farms can’t get any worse, we see more of the humiliating abuse that Amari and Tidbit must endure. Amari is whipped so severely by Percival Derby that it takes days for her to recover as she slips in and out of consciousness. When she is finally “on the mend,” she is forced to watch Clay and his friends torture Tidbit for their entertainment. One of Clay’s friends perpetuates the disgusting treatment of blacks when he demeans Amari in front of him and is surprised at Clay’s protectiveness: “I have the pick of the women on my father’s plantation…I was just asking who this one was” (159).

These abuses are obviously changing Amari. It is noted that she is “angry enough to lash out and kill” (160). While this sort of revenge is understandable, it also serves to represent the power of evil: that it can “spread” to even the most innocent by inspiring murderous thoughts as a demand for retribution. Perhaps this is another layer of meaning of Amari’s words when she says “Sometimes spirit die” (154). Besides suggesting that her will to live (her spirit) has died, Draper is also suggesting that the spirit of who Amari was as an innocent girl is gone, leaving her open to desires fuelled by hate. In an awful paradox, she has become the thing she hates by wanting to treat them as they are treating her.