Voices of the People: Our African-American Heritage
Teacher’s Guide, Grade 10, Level J
Bury Me in a Free Land, p. 26
Introducing the Lesson
Vocabulary for the Selection
bartered, v. Exchanged for goods or services
instead of for money
bay, n. Howl
galling, adj. Extremely painful
lofty, adj. At great height and exalted
Prereading
Discuss with students the Prereading note on page
26 before they begin reading the selection:
• The Role of Anti-Slavery Literature in Bringing
about Abolition. Explain to your students that
for many decades before the Civil War, there
had been a concerted movement in the United
States to abolish slavery. Those who worked in
this movement were called Abolitionists, and
many abolitionists used the power of the pen
to combat the evil of slavery. Included among
those who wrote essays, speeches, novels, plays,
poetry, and songs against slavery were many of
the most well-known and respected authors in
British and American literature--Samuel Johnson,
author of “A Brief to Free a Slave”; William
Wordsworth, author of a famous anti-slavery
passage in his famous long poem The Prelude
and of a number of short anti-slavery lyric
poems; Robert Burns, who wrote an anti-slavery
ballad called “The Slave’s Lament”; William
Blake, who wrote eloquently against racism
in his poem “The Little Black Boy,’” included
in his Songs of Innocence and Experience; and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, author of “The
Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” The New
England “Schoolhouse Poets” or “Fireside Poets”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell
Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier were both
staunch Abolitionists and wrote a great deal
of poetry against slavery. Other poets who are
less well known today also contributed to this
chorus: William Cowper, Charlotte Elizabeth,
Suzannah Watts, and John Pierpont, and many,
many others. William Wells Brown, author of
the anti-slavery novel Clotelle: A Tale of the
Southern States, edited an 1843 collection of
anti-slavery poems and songs called The AntiSlavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for AntiSlavery Meetings. Autobiographies written by
formerly enslaved people, commonly referred
to as slave narratives, helped to spread antislavery sentiments. Among the most widely read
of these were the autobiographies of Olaudah
Equiano and Frederick Douglass, as well as the
ficitonalized autobiography Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. Other
anti-slavery novels of the period included The
Curse Entailed, by Harriet Bigelow; Ellen, or
the Chained Mother, by Mary Harlan; Ida May,
by Mary Haden Green Pike; Oroonoko, or the
Royal Slave, by Aphra Behn; Penda: A True Tale,
by Maria Weston Champman; A Romance of
the Republic, by Lydia Maria Child; Uncle Tom’s
Cabin and The Two Altars, by Harriet Beecher
Stowe; and The White Slave; or, Memoirs of
a Fugitive, by Richard Hildreth. Such works
helped to inflame public opinion against slavery
throughout the North.
• Frances Harper as an Antislavery Activist. In
1852, Harper became a traveling speaker for the
Anti-Slavery Society and would read this poem at
her talks.
Close Reading
Have students glance through the questions under
Key Ideas and Details on page 29 and answer these
questions as they read through the selection. (See
the answers given below under “Answer Key.”)
copyright © 2012, Callisto School Publishing. All rights reserved.
Voices of the People: Our African-American Heritage
Teacher’s Guide, Grade 10, Level J
Bury Me in a Free Land, p. 26
Checktest
After students have read the selection, administer
the multiple-choice checktest to ensure that they
have done the reading.
Discussing the Selection
Refer students to the questions raised under
Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure, and
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas on page 29.
Discuss the questions raised in these sections, in
turn. (See the answers given below under “Answer
Key.”
After students have finished the checktest, hold a
class discussion of the selection.
Answer Key
Summarize for your students A Reading of the
Selection on page 28. Point out that Harper did,
indeed, get her wish, to be buried in a land free of
slaves. She lived a long life. Slavery ended in 1865.
Harper died in 1911.
Key Ideas and Details
Choose a student to read aloud the note on the
Cultural/Historical Context of the selection. Ask your
students to think about and share what they would
like to see changed or different in the world in their
lifetimes.
2. What specific evils of slavery does the speaker
describe in stanzas 2 through 6?
Read to students the note under About the Author
on page 23. Point out that many major figures
in the Abolitionist movement also worked in the
temperance and women’s suffrage movements.
The temperance movement worked toward the
abolition of alcohol which was seen as a scourge
of the poor, encouraging debt, domestic violence,
and child abuse. The women’s suffrage movement
worked to secure the right to vote for women.
All three movements, for the abolition of slavery,
for the prohibition of alcohol, and for women’s
right to vote, were ultimately successful, although
alcohol prohibition was later repealed. These figures
included Arthur and Lewis Tappan, William Lloyd
Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips,
William Wells Brown, Samuel Cornish, Robert
Purvis, Theodore Weld, Angelina and Sarah Grimke,
Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Susan
B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia
Bloomer.
1. What does the speaker want, according to stanza
1, instead of a fancy tomb?
She wants to be buried in a land free of slaves.
Answers will vary. She mentions chain gangs,
the despair of mothers whose children have
been taken from them, lashings, bloodhounds
seizing human prey, enchained captives, and girls
“bartered and sold for their . . . charms.”
3. Why does the mother in stanza 3 “shriek” with
“wild despair”?
This is explained in the following stanza (Stanza 4):
“And I saw her babes torn from her breast, / Like
trembling doves from their parent nest.”
4. What is the significance of the word afresh in
stanza 5? Why have the bloodhounds been
chasing this man?
The word afresh signals that the man has been
re-enslaved. He has escaped slavery, has been
hunted down with dogs, and has been captured
and chained.
5. In stanza 6, what is so horrific that it would cause
even a corpse to blush with shame?
copyright © 2012, Callisto School Publishing. All rights reserved.
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Voices of the People: Our African-American Heritage
Teacher’s Guide, Grade 10, Level J
Bury Me in a Free Land, p. 26
The bartering and selling of young girls “ for their
youthful charms” would, the speaker says, cause
her eye to “flash with a mournful flame” and her
cheek to “grow red with shame.”
Craft and Structure
The rhyme scheme is aabb. The rhyme scheme is
a very loose iambic tetrameter. There are four feet
(with four strong stresses) per line. Most feet are
iambic, but there is considerable variation, including
lines that open with anapests ( u u /) and trochees (/
u) and some lines that contain anapests and dactyls
(/ u u). The opening stanza has this meter:
MAKE me a GRAVE wherE’ER you WILL,
In a LOWly PLAIN, or a LOFty HILL;
MAKE it aMONG earth’s HUMblest GRAVES,
But NOT in a LAND where MEN are SLAVES.
Answers regarding Harper’s possible motivations
for choosing so simple a form may vary. Here’s
one reason: She wanted the poem to be easily
memorable. This poem caught on. It was memorized
and recited by others. It became very popular.
Having a simple form made the poem accessible
and easily remembered and thus served its political
purpose--which was to reach the widest possible
audience with her message. “Bury Me in a Free
Land” is, definitely, a poem of protest. It protests
slavery by pointing out various egregious wrongs that
accompany the institution.
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
Answers will vary. Nineteenth-century literary
language often tended to the melodramatic, and
certainly, Harper uses some highly emotionally
charged language “trembling slave,” “fearful gloom,”
“wild despair,” “fearful gash,” and so on. However,
it’s difficult to make a case that her language is
sentimentalized, or overly emotional, because
strong emotion is called for by her subject, which
is horrific. If such practices do not call for highly
emotional, highly charged language, it’s difficult to
imagine what would. In addition, it is anachronistic
to judge past writing by today’s standards of taste,
which are different. A realist author of the twentieth
or twenty-first centuries might choose not to use
emotional language, but, rather, to report the facts
via imagery and let his or her images engender an
emotional response in the reader or listener. Writers
in our time are often told to “show, not tell,” but this
was not a common practice in Harper’s day. Even the
words sentiment and sentimental did not have, in the
nineteenth century, the pejorative connotations that
they have today. Instead, they were widely used to
describe refined, as opposed to coarse, behavior—
behavior that was emotional because the emotions
were appropriate to a civilized, as opposed to a
savage or barbaric, person (such as one who would
countenance slavery).
Writing Practice
Use the Writing Rubric: Argument to assess the
student’s work. This rubric is available at http://
callistoeducation.com/Teacher10.htm.
Speaking and Listening Practice
As an example for your students of Harper’s
speeches, you may wish to share with them the
following work, “A Heritage of Scorn”: http://
historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5316/. Encourage your
students, when choosing a topic for their speeches,
to think of topics that they care about and to do a
little initial research on the Internet to ensure that
their topics are ones that they would like to explore,
are manageable, and can be reasonably researched
from readily available sources.
Language Practice
1. The participle trembling modifies slave.
copyright © 2012, Callisto School Publishing. All rights reserved.
Voices of the People: Our African-American Heritage
Teacher’s Guide, Grade 9, Level I
Yet Do I Marvel, p. 56
2. The participle trembling modifies air.
3. T he participial phrase torn from her breast
modifies babies.
4. T he participial phrase seizing their human prey
modifies bloodhounds.
5. T he compound participial phrase bartered and
sold for their youthful charms, which contains
the two participles bartered and sold, modifies
girls.
fiction, and anti-slavery tracts, essays, and
speeches.
• Project Gutenberg Titles by Frances Ellen
Watkins Harper. http://onlinebooks.
library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/
author?name=Harper%2C%20Frances%20
Ellen%20Watkins%2C%201825-1911. An
excellent collection of works by Frances Harper,
including Iola Leroy or, Shadows Uplifted, one
of the earliest novels by an African-American
woman, published in 1892.
Differentiating the Instruction
Here are some ideas for differentiating your
instruction for the selection:
• Ability with spoken language generally outpaces
reading and writing ability. You may wish to read
aloud part or all of the Prereading and other
study apparatus for the selection to your English
language learners.
• Consider reading part of the selection aloud to
you class and having them then complete the
reading on their own.
• Divide you class into study groups and have each
group choose, with your assistance, a gifted
reader to introduce (and read aloud) each part
of the study apparatus.
Additional Resources
Here are some additional resources for teaching the
lesson:
• Slavery Poems. http://www.brycchancarey.
com/slavery/poetry.htm. A good collection of
nineteenth-century poems dealing with slavery.
• Antislavery Literature. http://antislavery.
eserver.org/. A superb collection of antislavery
literature, including slave narratives, anti-slavery
copyright © 2012, Callisto School Publishing. All rights reserved.
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