Horror vs. Beauty Theme Analysis

Amari’s capture, journey across the Atlantic on a slave ship, and subsequent enslavement on Mr. Derby’s plantation is nothing short of horrific. She details all the horrible things that she witnesses and experiences firsthand, including being branded as a slave, seeing the male slaves on the ship stacked in the cargo hold, and being raped by sailors and by Mr. Derby’s son, Clay. However, even as she sees and experiences such deep pain and suffering, Amari never loses her ability to appreciate the beauty of the world around her—whether it’s the titular copper sun that rises and sets no matter where she is in the world, or the beautiful and hopeful children and babies whom she meets in the colonies. Using Amari as an example, the novel makes it clear that there’s potential to find evidence of beauty everywhere—and that while it may seem frivolous, it’s actually necessary to look for beauty if one hopes to survive in the face of so much horror.

The novel’s early passages make it clear that Amari and her tribe’s way of life in Africa has taught her to look for the beauty in the world. For example, even as Amari scolds her little brother, Kwasi, for climbing trees and being rambunctious, she still loves watching him climb and asks that he collect fruit if he’s going to be in the trees anyway. To Amari, Kwasi’s rebelliousness isn’t something to get seriously angry about—it’s something to celebrate and channel. This habit of looking at potentially dangerous or unnerving situations as opportunities, the novel shows, extends to her entire tribe. When members of the nearby Ashanti tribe arrive with white men, Amari ignores her underlying sense of unease about the visitors and instead, with the rest of her tribe, prepares a feast and a party—the only way, in her culture, to welcome visitors. This outlook becomes Amari’s downfall when the Ashanti and the white men begin a massacre during the celebration, but it’s important to note that this tragic turn of events isn’t Amari’s fault or that of the Ewe tribe more broadly. They had no way of knowing that the Ashanti, whom they trust, would facilitate the murder of the Ewes’ very young and very old, or the capture and enslavement of the teens and young people. Looking for beauty in everyone and everything is simply part of Amari’s tribe’s way of life.

However, as Amari and other members of her tribe are taken to a city on the coast and loaded onto a ship bound for the colonies in North America, Amari’s ability to look for the beauty in her surroundings is what keeps from falling prey entirely to despair. Life at sea is miserable: the ocean itself is terrifying, living on the ship is horrifying, and the sailors are overwhelmingly cruel and abusive to their human cargo. In the face of so much suffering, Amari finds she must look to her friend Afi in order to find a reason to endure her circumstances. Afi, importantly, provides Amari with companionship and information about what awaits them. She treats Amari like a daughter or a little sister, impressing upon Amari that even if she can’t count on her surroundings to uplift her, she can take comfort in the kindnesses of others. And indeed, Afi isn’t the only one who is kind to Amari on the ship: a sailor named Bill begins teaching her English. Though he’s certainly not Amari’s friend in the way that Afi is, his small kindness begins to take the edge off of her suffering and helps her survive, as knowing English helps her understand what’s going on and how she should react to each new circumstance.

Once in the colonies, despite the horrors that Amari encounters as a result of her enslavement by Mr. Derby, a wealthy white plantation owner, she finds a new reason to keep going: the slave children on the plantation are spots of beauty and brightness in her otherwise miserable world, and it’s essential to do everything she can to protect them. Amari works in the kitchens alongside a slave woman named Teenie and her four-year-old son, Tidbit. Tidbit provides much-needed brightness to Amari’s life as he bounds along with his puppy, Hushpuppy, cracking jokes and reminding Amari of her brother Kwasi. However, Amari is also forced to reckon with the fact that due to what slave owners are legally allowed to do to their slaves, the lives of young children like Tidbit are at particular risk—Clay Derby, on one occasion, scoops Tidbit up to dangle him in the river as bait while he and his friends hunt alligators. And later, when Mr. Derby discovers that his wife gave birth not to his own child, but to a baby girl fathered by Mrs. Derby’s slave and bodyguard, Noah, he shoots Noah and the infant. This act symbolically destroys the innocent beauty and the hope of a better future that the baby represents. Then, to punish Teenie for her role in attempting to cover up the baby’s parentage, Mr. Derby decides to sell Tidbit. Tidbit, along with Amari and the indentured servant Polly (both of whom attended the birth), are able to escape and head south to Fort Mose, where it’s rumored that they can all be free. And as Amari leads her companions south, she focuses less on her own prospects of freedom and more on Tidbit’s future—Teenie, she knows, wants desperately for her son to experience freedom, even though Teenie believes that she herself will never be free. Ultimately, the novel suggests that it is the beauty that can be found in other people that enables individuals to survive and strive for better for the next generation.