The Underground Railroad

Chapter 17 Summary

During her childhood, a woodcut image of “a missionary surrounded by jungle natives” convinced Ethel that her spiritual fulfillment lay with serving “the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light” (195). She fantasized about the ship that would bear her to the distant land, and about the “niggers” (195) that would praise her name.

At 8 years old, Ethel soaked up the accounts of undiscovered lands and pygmy peoples that festooned the newspapers. But the nearest she could get to fulfilling her fantasies was playing with Jasmine, the daughter of the family slave Felice. When Edgar Delany, Ethel’s father, turned 10, Felice was given to him as a present. As Edgar grew into a man, he came to regard Felice, with her immaculate ways in the house and “darky wisdom” (196), as a miracle. He gave her a pass to visit the Parker plantation every year, and she returned from one of those visits pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter, Jasmine, and the Delanys now had two slaves.

Initially, Ethel thought that slaves were people “who lived in your house like family” (196). Her father carefully rid her of this idea, telling her that slaves were the descendants of the “cursed, black Ham, who had survived the Flood by clinging to the peaks of a mountain in Africa” (196).