The Slave Dancer Character Analysis

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Imagine, going to collect candles for your mother, only to get kidnapped, and taken aboard a ship heading east to go collect slaves to trade like animals. This is what 13 year old Jessie has to go through. As you can imagine, this experience changed him, it showed him a new perspective of the world no person should have to see. Jessie sees many terrible things, but some events had a bigger impact on his already damaged worldviews than others. In the story The Slave Dancer, there are many evolutions of Jessie’s personality throughout the story, but here are two of the most impactful events on Jessie’s character.

With Jessie witnessing the awful conditions the slaves were kept in, he saw the taking of many of …show more content…
In the chapter “Ben Stout’s Mistake”, The Moonlight’s crew spots a fastly approaching ship. The ship, although close enough to see roughly, was unidentifiable as a Spanish or American ship. Ben Stout, thinking he knew the answer, tells the crew to keep up the American flags; saying he knew the ship and its crew. ‘“I know that ship, Captain,” protested Stout. “she won’t bother us.”” (Chp. 7, Pg. 79) Upon Stout’s word, the crew stopped raising the Spanish flags, and calmly waited for the ship’s approach. As it grew closer, the crew realized it was,in fact, an American ship, but it was not a slave ship, as Stout thought. It turned out, the ship did not leave them alone (due to the fact that what they were doing was highly illegal). Instead, it headed straight for them. With the ship coming to take them down, they had no choice (in their opinion) but to throw the slaves overboard. From there, chaos ensued, and when it finally ended, the ship had sunk, and Jessie and Ras (a slave boy who had escaped) were stuck drifting towards shore. While in the long run, this change of events did get Jessie home and back to his family, it was a highly traumatic event that would scar Jessie for the rest of his days on this earth.

In the end, the events that occurred over the course of the book The Slave Dancer, affected Jessie, and how he saw the world. Witnessing the death of an innocent child, and the sinking of a ship, stranding him in the water with a former slave, changed Jessie, how he saw the world, and mostly, how he saw other
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