Thursday, November 19, 2009

The Watson's Go to Birmingham


  1. It was so cold on Saturday,the Watson's sat huddled together under a blanket on the coach.

  2. Momma felt the cold most because she was from Alabama.

  3. Kenny and his family lived in Flint Michigan.

  4. Joetta was Kenny's little sister.

  5. According to Kenny, which of the following was NOT true of his older brother Byron? He tried to make momma laugh all the time.

  6. The weather man said that the weather in Atlanta,Georgia would reach the mid-seventies.

  7. Dad told Kenny,Byron,and Joetta they were lucky not to be the children one of mamma's old boyfriends named Hambone Henderson.

  8. When she was about to laugh,Momma put her hand over her mouth because she had a big gap between her front teeth.

  9. Which of the following was NOT a warning Moses Henderson gave Momma about flint? Because is was so cold, Babies were born with lumpy heads.

  10. Momma said life in Birmingham,even though it was not perfect, was slower,friendlier, and people were more honest about the way they felt.

  11. Since they couldn't contact their landlord about there cold apartment, the Watson's planned to spend the night with aunt Cyndy.

  12. The brown bomber was the Watson's' 1948 Plymouth.

  13. Byron and Kenny were not happy when dad ordered them to scrape the ice off the car windows.

  14. Kenny was agitated because Byron said he was adopted and shouldn't be forced to work for the Watson family.

  15. The night before,Byron and his friend buphead had given Kenny lessons on how to survive a blizzard.

  16. At first Kenny ignored Bryon's calls because he thought his brother was playing another trick on him.

  17. Kenny discovered that Byron's mouth was frozen onto the outside mirror.

  18. Kenny's parent's were shook up when they heard that Byron was crying.

  19. Dad laughed at Byron predicament because he realized that Byron had been kissing his reflection in the mirror.

  20. Kenny could tell mama was worried because she started to talk southern style.

  21. During Byron's ordeal dad kept laughing and making jokes about the situation.

  22. Pouring hot water was not a good idea.

  23. With all five of them crying and standing around a car in freezing temperatures, Kenny thought it was no wonder that the neighbor's called them the weird Watson's.

  24. Momma freed Byron from his predicament by yanking his head away from the mirror.

  25. On the way to Aunt Cyndeys when Kenny paid Byron back for punching him in the forehead and for not doing his share of the work,all of the Watson's except for Byron cracked up.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

My African Burial Ground essay

The African Burial Ground is located in down-town Manhattan, it is where the many body's of freed and enslaved Africans were found.During the building of a federal office building in 1991 the construction workers found SOME human remains, but it didn't seem like a major problem. Then more and more bones started showing up.They did become a major problem for them so they had to postpone the building and turn it into an excavation site. Soon after that archaeologists were digging for bones and examining them one-by-one to see if they could find anything about that person or a written document of some type but they couldn't find any thing.This means that the black people weren't counted as a '' population '' .The white people thought that the black people could be disposed of or that they weren't smart enough to be human.They thought that they were so much like animals that they shouldn't be counted as a population.

The original burial ground was closed in 1794.

The African burial grounds name gives away a clue as to what race the people who were buried there were, but they came from many different parts of Africa. Archaeologists believe that most of them came from west Africa because of the way some of the body's were positioned and what they were buried with.Another reason why archaeologists say this is because sankofa ( a west African symbol) was found on one of the coffins and many others were buried with beads around there waists which was a west African tradition.

In the 1700's African Americans were working hard to build and improve a society that they weren't really welcome in.Slaves were sold on wall street every week.The men were sold for fifteen cents and the women and children were sold for half the amount.Many children died from working to hard.

When slaves were in new Amsterdam under dutch rule, the living conditions of slaves improved allot because they started getting a little freedom then they had under English rule. When the dutch had slaves they treated them with almost as many rights as they had themselves ,but still they were slaves and weren't so free or as free as the dutch or white people.Then the dutch created the rule that the adult slaves could be '' half - free'' so they had half the rights of free people and there children had to be '' full - slaves''.