“It was the day after the boy from the Union1 had come to the farm to let the slaves know, they were freemen” (Page 1 line 1-2). When at last, getting free from the strains of prohibition and entrenchment of being a slave, people will use this newly acquired freedom differently. In Richard Gibney’s “The Whipping Boy”, written in 2011, the reader gets an insight into what Mikey, Tommy, and Martha, do with this newly acquired freedom. Growing into a life of slavery, where all their actions were always to be dictated by their owner, the characters were bewildered at first and did not know how to get by when transitioning into a life of freedom. The taste of freedom and the inexperience of how to live in a racially segregated society, causes the characters to do things that
are seen as unacceptable behavior and peculiar in the social environment they are living in.
The story is set on a farm in the southern states of the United States, right after the Civil War. The results of the Civil War lead to the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the abolishment of slavery, granting every slave freedom, as expressed here, “Thirty-four days after the boy from the Union had read them the Emancipation Proclamation” (Page 2 Line 56). The government freed slaves but stepped into an era where segregation and discrimination were fixed into the laws, these laws being known as the Jim Crow laws. The gradual bitterness of the southern Confederates and the white supremacists at the time, made the atmosphere carry a lot of hate and despise for African Americans. This allowed a majority of white Americans to see themselves as more superior than people who were African American. “She pulled away, embarrassed at his lascivious behavior in front of the white boy” (Page 1 Line 30), what this quote illustrates, are the social inequalities at the time, showing that African Americans had to act a certain way in front of white Americans.
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