Gender, Race, and Power Theme Analysis

While Copper Sun primarily concerns itself with the horrors and struggles that enslaved Black people (particularly enslaved Black women) faced, the novel nevertheless offers a nuanced picture of who had power in the North American colonies and who doesn’t. Though enslaved Black people certainly suffer the most, they aren’t the only demographic who did. Rather, Copper Sun delves into a power structure that puts wealthy, white, and male slave owners—like Mr. Derby—at the very top and everyone else (including wealthy white women and poorer white slave owners) beneath them. By exploring different intersections of race, gender, and wealth, the novel suggests that in order to understand the time period in which the novel takes place (1738) and the colonial South more broadly, it’s essential to move beyond thinking strictly in terms of white versus Black. While the system at work in the colonies is undeniably racist, it’s also sexist and classist—and this system (to varying degrees and with differing consequences) harms nearly everyone who isn’t white, wealthy, and male.

By following two different protagonists—Amari and Polly—in close third-person narration, Copper Sun shows how each young woman experiences classism, racism, and sexism in the colonies. While Amari undeniably suffers more and in different ways than Polly does, due to their sex and economic situations, they experience some overlapping mistreatment. Amari, being a Black slave, is treated like an animal. The slave traders, and later her owners, Mr. Derby and his 16-year-old son Clay Derby, talk about Amari as though she can’t understand and as though she’s an inanimate plaything. Since Polly is white, the Derbys treat her somewhat better—they at least speak to her as though she’s a human being. But Polly is an indentured servant, a person who enters into a contract of their own will, stipulating that they’ll work for a set number of years to pay off debts. Under this contract, Polly is required to live and work with the Black slaves, but she struggles to figure out exactly where she fits in on the Derby plantation. Because she’s white and holds a number of racist views, she sees herself as better than the Black slaves. But because she’s an indentured servant and performs the same work as those Black slaves, in practice, she has no more power than they do. The differences between Amari and Polly begin to illuminate just how multilayered the power structure is in colonial America—and make it clear that women, especially Black women, struggle in this system most of all.

In the same vein, even though Mrs. Derby is white and of a high class, her womanhood means that she’s nonetheless treated poorly. As Amari, Polly, and a house slave named Lena discuss how wealthy Mrs. Derby is and how idyllic her life must be, Teenie, the cook, shatters this fantasy by insisting that Mrs. Derby is “pretty close to” a slave. In Teenie’s estimation, “[Mr. Derby] decide where [Mrs. Derby] go, who she talk to, what she wear—everything.” Indeed, when Amari and Polly attend Mrs. Derby’s labor with her first baby, they discover that the baby’s father isn’t Mr. Derby—it’s Mrs. Derby’s slave and bodyguard, Noah. The color of the baby’s skin makes it obvious that she isn’t Mr. Derby’s child, and Amari and Polly realize that Mrs. Derby could now be in just as much danger of her husband’s wrath as any of the slaves are. And indeed, when Mr. Derby figures out what happened and shoots both the infant and Noah, he makes it abundantly clear that he’s well within his rights to “deal with” both his slaves and his wife as he sees fit—the fact that Mrs. Derby is his wife (and therefore his property) means that she can’t love who she wants to love, or give birth to a dark-skinned baby, without consequences. However, she does have some sliver of privilege because she’s white and Mr. Derby’s wife—she isn’t shot immediately. Being white and wealthy protects her from immediate death, even if it can’t save her from a miserable life.

Following this disaster, as Polly, Amari, and Teenie’s four-year-old son, Tidbit, run away to the Florida Territory where they believe they’ll be free, they encounter people along the way who continue to illustrate that sexism, classism, and racism all work together to create a complex social structure that places enslaved (or runaway) Black people at the bottom. This hierarchy gives others varying degrees of power depending on their economic status or their sex. Nathan, a white boy who helps them, is from a family too poor to purchase slaves—and, possibly because he empathizes or simply doesn’t stand to benefit as much from slavery, he doesn’t believe in the system of slavery at all. Another white woman who helps them, Fiona O’Reilly, is married to a man who owns slaves, and she fully supports the institution—the slaves’ unpaid labor is how they’re able to scrape by on their farm. But because her husband shows her so little respect and doesn’t allow her to make any decisions, she delights in helping slaves who don’t belong to her husband escape. Polly suspects that Fiona’s choice to help them is the first decision Fiona has ever made on her own, and to Fiona, it likely seems like a way to feel powerful and in control when the rest of the time, she has little or no say in what goes on in her life. With this, Copper Sun makes it clear that it’s impossible to look at the social structure of the colonies as simply a matter of racism, sexism, or classism. Rather, the novel encourages readers to understand that while enslaved Black people (and especially women) had the least amount of power and while wealthy white men had the most, it’s nevertheless essential to take the many different facets of a person’s identity into account when evaluating their choices, their prospects for advancement, or their degree of vulnerability in the colonial system.