The Slave Ship, by Marcus Rediker was wrote in 2007 about the cruel and brutal actions the slaves endured on their journey across the Atlantic Ocean. He states, “this has been a painful book to write, if I have done any justice to the subject, it will be a painful book to read.” Marcus Rediker accomplished exactly that. This book was not only compelling but emotional, heartbreaking, and makes a reader think, how could someone be so cruel to another living being. Within the first couple pages, the book brought me to tears.
Throughout the narrative Douglass uses rhetorical imagery in order to provide readers with an insight to the true horrors of slavery. In chapter one of the narrative, Douglass speaks of the time when he would witness his aunt being tortured and beat by the master. He writes about seeing her “covered in blood” with “a whip upon her naked back”. Douglass uses and explains this experience in detail in order to paint a picture in the readers’ head and give them a firsthand experience to the harsh life of a slave. By using blood as an example of what he sensed, he is bringing in a word that is emotionally tied.
The theme of the three interviews is “slavery from the perspective of former slaves” but they do not deal with the same subject. What the interviewees told to the interviewers is different depending on the quality of their memory. However, these interviews portray the Yankees in the same way: they were harmless people, they did nothing except eating food. According to Maugan Shepherd, William Colbert and “Aunt” Rhody Holsell, food was the only thing Union soldiers cared about. Paul D. Escott says in “The Art and Science of Reading WPA Slave Narratives” that too avoid the problems of WPA narratives, such as children slave narratives we just have to compare them with slave narratives from old former slaves.
Throughout the narrative, the author includes his personal stories about experiencing the violence of slavery first-hand. For example, on page 20, he writes about the first time he witnessed a slave, his own aunt, getting the whip. “The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest…I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition… It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery…” The author including his experience of his aunts whipping, in detail, appeals to the emotions of the reader.
Hopkins remained but a short time in the office of overseer. Why his career was so short, I do not know, but suppose he lacked the necessary severity to suit Colonel Lloyd. ”(Douglass 32). Aunt Hester, a slave Frederick’s master owned, was stripped naked from neck to waist and beaten with a whip until she bled. Whipping is such as not getting up early or not doing your work fast enough, but other times it was just seen as a form of enjoyment.
Both Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Frederick Douglass’s narrative draw many similar parallels between the systematic oppression of black people in modern times and in the 19th century. The scenes of police brutality in 13th especially reflects Douglass’s influence on DuVernay’s perspective. In these scenes, we see black people violently, and sometimes fatally, attacked by the police, who are meant to protect people. This random violence against the black community leads to an overwhelming sense of fear and distrust of authority. This fear mimics the fear Douglass felt when he witnessed the Captain’s cruelty during the scene of Aunt Hester’s torture in Douglass’s narrative.
“Gone, gone, sold and gone” (qtd. Douglass 349) illustrates how the slaves how slaves were compared to live stock in America. Slavery was abolished about one hundred fifty years ago, but it is important to not forget the history surrounding it. Even though some people don’t understand the hardships that blacks in slavery faced, it is helpful to read slave narratives. Slave Narratives were either written by slaves, or with assistance from white abolitionist, as an effort to end slavery. Abolitionists wanted to illuminate the horrors that slaves experienced.
In Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs narrative they show how the institution of slavery dehumanizes an individual both physically and emotionally. In Jacobs narrative she talks about how women had it worse than men did in slavery. While men suffered, women had it worse due to sexual abuse. The emotional, physical, and sexual abuse was dehumanizing for anyone.
“I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves”. During my trips back to the south to save my fellow brothers and sister I wasn 't thinking about myself and getting caught I was thinking about how much im impacting their lives. I freed about a Thousand slaves in a decade and I could 've saved even more but the problem was them knowing that they were slaves and there was a better life without masters and people that treat the floor better than they treated you a fellow human. When the civil war began I was a freedom fighter and a renowned abolitionist and a underground railroad conductor throughout 10 years I took many trips back to the south and trust me there where extremely dangerous.
Documenting not only the fear that the slaves faced but also the violence of both physical and sexual abuse, the most ghastly account was towards a slave women he was imprisoned with named Patsey. She was a slave who had the misfortune of
The slaveholders left no possibility of showing mercy upon the people in bondage. Overseers at the plantations were equally diabolical as their employers, if not more and Mr.Severe is one example who would publicly torture the slaves: “I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s release” (Douglass 14). This is public torture and this impacted the woman, the children, and Douglass. Physical pain is already burdening but humiliates the receiver of the lashes and instills fear in the people watching. The children here could be connected to Douglass’s witnessing Aunt Hestor’s whipping and that also shapes their mental health.
Even more brutally described is the physical state of the suffering slave; “I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on…” (Butler 33-36). Readers’ will have an imagine of agony and torture produced simply by the words used to accurately describe the whipping of a African American runaway slave, and eventually the sexual assault of Dana, the main
I am an African American female whom is a descendent from the African Slave and a native American refugee. My culture runs deep in my veins and I am a product of the strength of my mother and father. While growing up I understood we were on the poverty line. My family lived in a small home with 3 bedrooms and occupied 7 people. I grew up in a small southeast Georgian town named Statesboro.
Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420). For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue.
How big of impact could slavery have done to Africa at least that’s what they said? The slave trade had huge and horrible impact on Africa because it resulted in a tremendous loss of life, Africa has not developed economically as a result of the Slave trade, and Africa still suffers and is unable to provide food and water for its people. Africa had a huge loss of people but to be exact “nearly 90 percent of the Africans in these two major regions came from only four zones in Africa. ”(“The Transatlantic Slave Trade”, para 48) all had to go even against their will 10 million enslaved men, women, and children from West and East Africa to North Africa, the Middle East, and India.
