Perserverance

1. Figurative Language - When the lines say "My soul has grown deep as the rivers" he is saying that his entire communities soul, their history, is every flowing like a river, and they will always persevere.

2. Structure - the individual lines mentioned before and after the narrator's ethnic history show his perseverance.

3. Characters - The only character mentioned in the poem is "I", the narrator, but "I" is referring to all the ethnicities previously involved in slavery.