How do you belong when the world around you; Was never designed… for you to fit in?
In WHY, two sisters—one white, one Black—experience three radically different American cultures: the opulent world of white Southern planters, the enslaved communities hidden behind that facade, and the nomadic freedom of the Plains Indians. This convergence of cultures isn’t just a literary device. It’s a mirror of 19th-century America’s fractured identity—a nation battling over who gets to define “freedom.”
The White Planter Class: Power Built on Cotton and Cruelty
The planter elite in the antebellum South lived lavishly—wealth measured in acres, human lives, and pounds of cotton. It was a world obsessed with appearances, lineage, and legacy. But that prosperity was supported…, rested upon a bedrock of systemic brutality. Which resulted in the creation of a culture in-which white-supremist doctrines; The enslavement and ownership of those who were non-whites; Those beings were thought of as being sub-human and therefore disposable.
The Billings family in WHY embodies this privilege—complex, entitled, and bound to a moral code that prioritizes property over people.
The Enslaved: A Community of Resistance and Resilience
Behind the columns of mansions like Rosewood Plantation, a different world thrived—one where music, storytelling, spiritual practices, and kinship networks served as lifelines. While enslaved people were denied basic rights, they built rich cultural systems that kept memory, hope, and identity alive.
Mandy’s journey reveals this world—one of pain, yes, but also of power. Enslaved people found freedom not just in escape, but in faith, language, and love.
The Plains Indians: Nomadic Sovereignty Under Siege
The introduction of a Comanche warrior in the story brings readers to a third realm—one often forgotten in the binary narrative of Black and white America. Indigenous cultures had their own histories, their own systems of governance, and their own battles for survival amid colonization.
The Plains Indians’ nomadic life represented a kind of freedom neither Black nor white settlers could fully understand: a relationship with land and legacy that defied European notions of ownership.
Why It Matters Today
America still struggles to reconcile its cultural collisions. The legacies of these three worlds continue to shape our politics, our education, and our identities.
Who gets to belong? Who gets to speak for the past? Who still carries the burden of history?
A Reflection for Readers
Which of these three cultures—planter, enslaved, or Indigenous—do you feel your story is connected to, even distantly?
And how might honoring all of them help us understand what it means to be American?
