Many African American women have faced labeling. In the slave times, you were either a free black, or former slave. Ones skin color, education, wealth, marital status, social status, and hair texture, or whether you had "good hair," were all factors in the caste system for African Americans. In Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege, Kent Anderson Leslie tells the true story of a woman, Amanda America Dickson, whose life shows how these definitions were crucial to an African American woman's life, and how, with tenacity and determination, one woman defined herself. She, her father and her mother all helped define who she was and who she became. Amanda America Dickson's life is one of active self-definition rather than passive submission to the restriction of enslavement and its entitlements. .
As an African American woman born to a white father and enslaved mother, Amanda America Dickson's life could have been no different from the thousands of other children in the same situation. Her father, David Dickson, made sure that it was not. From the day of her birth she was raised in the main house, in his mother's room and .
declared, "that he believed it was his duty to care for his daughter and he wanted her to be with him." By doing this, Dickson had already erased one of the boundaries that slave women faced, the right to be educated and raised as a lady. This helped Amada Dickson to actively self-define her existence throughout her life. She was considered a slave, and could not be freed, to do so required her to leave the state. Despite this she was raised, by her grandmother mostly, and " learned to play the piano, to dress with subdued elegance, including the display of jewelry, and to behave like a "lady," in the educated thou ornamental sense." Dickson doted on his daughter and it is believed that he gave Amanda Dickson her earliest education in reading and writing, for their handwriting is similar.
