Amos Fortune, Free Man

Amos Fortune, Free Man emphasizes a value of hard work and self-reliance. By endowing Fortune with these qualities, Yates positions him as an idealized image of a Black man. This ideal is defined through the lens of white supremacy and ignores Black people’s humanity, rights, and moral character since it assumes that all their suffering is justified if it teaches them the value of hard work. This value structure has three main elements: Yates identifies poverty as the result of personal moral failing, perpetuates ideas that Black enslaved people are not all deserving of their freedom, and ignores the fact that not all people (Black or white) are equally equipped for upward mobility. 

In condemning Lois’s character, Yates perpetuates the idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy and do not work hard enough. This view ignores that poverty can result from complex socioeconomic, political, and personal factors. Indeed, the novel does not offer any further evidence of Lois being a unique case as someone who is particularly idle and neglectful of her responsibilities; the only evidence of her supposed “shiftlessness” is her poverty and Violet’s judgment of her. The idea that poverty is one’s own fault and one’s own responsibility has historically stereotyped and disadvantaged Black people and other people of color.