Mal and slavers?
POSTED BY: slayer730
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 27, 2004 05:01
VIEWED: 7999
PAGE 2 of 4
Good point about the duel, although if it would have been with one of those whole mess of guns they collected at the door I'm pretty sure Mal would have shot Ath in the head and that would have been that.
But since it was a duel with sw-whats, he decided that upstaging this great swordsman and then not killing him would be hi-lerrious so that's where he went with it. Mal does so enjoy mixing some laughs in with his violence.
Glad the slavery stuff made sense, good to see that expensive education wasn't *totally* wasted, knew all those Civil War and Reconstruction classes would payoff someday. 
Pain is scary...
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What about the 20 "immigrant workers" Mal hand delivered for the Alliance in the "Dead or Alive" script? Not saying that it means anything, but I thought I'd point it out just to see what comes of it.
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In Our Dear Mrs. Reynolds he talks to Saphron about peoples rights to be free, so yes its pretty obvious he hates slavers.
Well isn't that...special
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In regards to whether "indentured servant" and "slave" have the same meaning in FFverse or closer to our meaning....
In "Train Job" Inara says that Mal is her indentured servant with 6 months left on his sentence...
Sounds like indentured servitude is a timed thing and possibly slavery, by contrast, is not.
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The (shiny) Hat wrote:
Quote:
A slave was owned outright, but an indentured servant was someone who worked to pay off a debt of some sort. Granted, the type of work, the working conditions, and the rights of each were virtually indistinguishable, but there was a difference between them two.
Actually, indentured servitude as practiced in the northeastern part of the U.S. was considered slavery by many. Typically, the servant borrowed money for passage to the New World, agreeing to pay it off over a period of 2-4 years. Problem was, the owner of the paper also provided clothing, room and board, then tacked the charges for those items onto the servant's bill. As a consequence, the term of servitude actually got longer as it was being served. Many had to be legally manumitted from their 'debt' after creatively-prolonged terms of service.
Now, let's see if Joss doesn't bring up sharecropping -- another thinly veiled form of slavery -- in future Firefly episodes (zoid prays most arduously).
Respectfully,
zoid
_________________________________________________
"River and me was best friends, back then. I named my first-born daughter after her. 'Course, you can't swing a dead cat 'round here on I-Day without hittin' a River..."
- Kaywinnit Tam, wife and mother of 6, A Child Shall Lead Them: A History of the Second War of Independence Wilkins, Richard
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Theory: Actually, Mal WAS a slave - this idea from my wife (she wants credit).
40 hands on his mother's farm, eh? What do you want to bet SHE was a slave, on a farm with slaves, and Mal was raised as a slave from birth? The Independents = the anti-slavery side of the War, and they freed several slaves as they went. Who knows? Maybe the Alliance was officially pro-slavery...there's a real turn-the-civil-war-on-its-head thing going on here. What if you just change the colors of the coats, and the SOUTH won in Firefly?
Wow...okay, so I'm going WAY into speculation, but this blows my mind...all the signs are there, if you're twisted enough to believe them - Mal was raised religious (before he lost it), Mal fought with the losers of the war, Mal has a rough country (Southern?) accent, Mal's never mentioned his father (a telltale sign of a person with real-world slavery roots)...
So, what do you think?
As for the indentured servitude being pseudo-slavery, I agree - somehow, I'm betting the poor Mudders aren't able to buy passage off Higgen's Moon...
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Forrestwolf and other interested parties:
Many people today believe (a word that gets me in no end of trouble) that the American Civil War was "The War To End Slavery". While it's true the war did finally bring an end to the most heinous chapter in our cultural history, slavery was not the issue that caused the war. "States Rights" was the focal point of the debate that led to revolution. While to a certain extent the issue of slavery was always a hot topic, Northern states held more political power due to population density (especially considering that the South had many non-voting slaves) and passed several laws that included favorable tariffs for Northern manufacturers, at the expense of Southern agriculturalists. The Southern states held to the Jeffersonian ideal, that individual states could nullify Congressional acts that were outside the federal powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution. By degrees the whole issue devolved into debate, anger and bloodshed (much like political threads on FFFn).
The Civil War officially began on April 12, 1861. The Emancipation Proclamation -- which only freed the slaves in Rebel states, not Union-occupied slaveholding states -- was decreed on January 1, 1863, nearly two years after the start of the war. All slaves were freed by Constitutional Amendment after the war in 1865. To be fair, a large faction of the States' Rights movement of the time became bellicose because they saw the hammer coming: Lincoln was going to free the slaves; Northern-controlled Congress was going to run it roughshod past any Southern opposition; and without an individual state's right to declare such legislation 'outside the Constitution's purview', Southern plantation owners were going to lose their cheap (despicably got and held) labor force.
According to Encarta, "As a further result of the proclamation, the Republican party became unified in principle and in organization, and the prestige it attained enabled it to hold power until 1884."
People today also believe (there's that word again) that Lincoln was a Democrat. He was in fact a founding member of the Grand Old Party. The Democrats were the South. So when you're asking if Joss might turn the tables on us, seems to me the history of the past 140 years has already done that, so... I'm getting dizzy...
What was the question again?
Oh, yeah, "Was Mal a slave?" Umm, I dunno. I tend to think he just disliked slavery the way many God-fearing, non-plantation-owning Southerners disliked slavery. 'Cause it was wrong. In lieu of further evidence from Joss -- and evidence of Mal's life before the Unification War is very sparse -- I prefer to believe that Mal, his Ma and their 40 ranch hands all lived in an anarcho-syndicalist commune, because their planet was originally settled by Monty Python aficionados.
BTW, I remember him telling Saffron that he grew up on a ranch, but I must've missed the reference to a specific number (40?) of ranch hands; where was that?
Respectfully,
zoid
_________________________________________________
"River and me was best friends, back then. I named my first-born daughter after her. 'Course, you can't swing a dead cat 'round here on I-Day without hittin' a River..."
- Kaywinnit Tam, wife and mother of 6, A Child Shall Lead Them: A History of the Second War of Independence Wilkins, Richard
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"40 hands" was quoted by Gunhand - I was just repeating. I think Gunhand's right, from my vague recollection - but I'm not certain.
As for the War, I wasn't intending to get into a discussion of Northern vs. Southern intentions in the ACTUAL Civil War - as you've pointed out, there's a lot to history there that can be discussed at length. I'd say it's more a question of JOSS's interpretation of events, and where he's going with the series.
Which is where I get to slavery and freedom - I'd still maintain that one (certainly not the only) of the themes of Firefly is freedom. We really don't know for sure yet about Mal - we can hope there will be more tidbits in the BDM, but in the meantime, I'll take my wild guess and stick with it. One vote for Mal = slave :) You could be right - he could just be someone who understands the evils of slavery - but I'd guess there's some secret yet to be revealed...
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Quote:
Originally posted by zoid:
Actually, indentured servitude as practiced in the northeastern part of the U.S. was considered slavery by many. Typically, the servant borrowed money for passage to the New World, agreeing to pay it off over a period of 2-4 years. Problem was, the owner of the paper also provided clothing, room and board, then tacked the charges for those items onto the servant's bill. As a consequence, the term of servitude actually got longer as it was being served. Many had to be legally manumitted from their 'debt' after creatively-prolonged terms of service.
Now, let's see if Joss doesn't bring up sharecropping -- another thinly veiled form of slavery -- in future Firefly episodes (zoid prays most arduously).
Respectfully,
zoid
Zoid--
Ask anyone who's gotta work for nothing or close enough not to make a difference... who has few or no rights... who is stuck in a place against their will.... I think they'd call it slavery.
I wasn't trying to say there's a world of difference between the two, just a technical difference. Slavery and Ind Serv looked the same on the surface, absolutely. But slavery had no time limit, whereas Ind Serv., even if the debt kept getting increased and pushed back, had an eventual expiration date of sorts.
But either way, they're both a whole lot of suckage...
Is this what people call "off on a tangent"? I do that a lot...
--The Hat
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"I like smackin 'em"--Jayne
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I think that Mal's mother being a slave is a really good theory, however i just watch Our Mrs. Reynolds just yesterday and he seemed to talk about his childhood with a kind of fondness, and yes he says there are 40 ranch hands (thats one big ranch!) something i don't think he would do if he was a slave, but i do agree there is probably some slave in his background!
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