A New Perspective

Reading slave narratives from real life events, and real people, only made the concept of slavery so much more real. You learn about slavery in your history class, from your parents, from your friends, and from your books, but it only remained a concept to me. Before the narratives (online and in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass) I thought “Slavery: black people were held as slaves to white farm workers, and they were often whipped. It was bad”. Frederick Douglass made me feel the emotional and physical pain that the slaves endured, while reading the narratives online put a face, and a story to the concept.
Frederick Douglass used descriptive language in his narrative to make slavery real for me. It was mostly when he was describing the whippings that I could almost literally feel the pain. The feelings were particularly authentic when Douglass described a whipping incident he witnessed in his childhood “…and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor” (13). After reading this, I could nearly see the incident happening myself. This made slavery so much more traumatic, and like less of a theory.
The narrative on Charity Anderson wasn’t nearly as appalling as the other stories, but it was honest and showed the perspective of a better slavery experience. Anderson enjoyed her times as a slave, and even referred to it as “de good ol’ days”.  That’s a perspective you don’t exactly hear about every day, but it doesn’t justify slavery as a whole.
It was a surprise to me that even the oppressed were enslaving the oppressed. You would think the Indians would have sympathy toward African slaves, but Lucinda Davis was the slave for a Creek Indian. Davis didn’t seem to hate her owners, but didn’t speak a whole lot of good about them. The fact that Indians were holding slaves really shows how dehumanized Africans were during this time period. This gave me a new outlook on the importance of learning slavery in my history class.
The last narrative I read was a typical slave story you would hear. Walter Calloway worked hard, and his overseer whipped him and the other slaves if they didn’t do their work correctly. Calloway recalls seeing a thirteen year old girl almost dying from being whipped so violently. This is more like a story I expected to hear after reading Frederick Douglass’ narrative. One new thing I got to learn from this narrative was how he was affected by the Civil War. He looked back on when he saw soldiers burning down cotton plantations and smoke houses. He also stated “Twarn't long atter dat dey tell us we'se free. But lawdy, Cap'n, we ain't nebber been what I calls free”. He talked about how hard they worked even after they were free, and how their living conditions were often worse than they were before the Civil War. This was something we only briefly touched on in our history class. Learning this gave me some new insight as to what slaves saw, and felt even during and after the Civil War.
Through reading these narratives I was given a whole new perspective on slavery. My thoughts on slavery are no longer: it’s bad, white people were mean. I think of it as horrific, and cruel.