This particular story is regarding Booker T. Washington childhood and his impression of what it was like to be a slave in the mid 1800’s. Even though, slavery was legal these people were treated inhumanly by their owners. They experience hardships they did not look for, they were robbed of their freedom, condemned to privation and suffering and even dead by whomever owned them. However, Booker T. Washington did not experience some of that treatment as he describes in this story. Equally, to the several other slaves he knew of at the plantation and others from around the area he grew up in.
Even though, he was deprived of his freedom, and despite the hardships, Washington remembers that the slaves did not have negative feelings or resentment toward the whites. To the contrary, these slaves would feel in a way compassion or sympathy towards them. He states: “As a rule, not only did the members of my race entertain no feelings of bitterness against the whites before and during the war,
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Washington, I felt he was in a way unsure of how to describe slavery, kind of being cautious to some extent. To such a degree, he was situated somewhere between two extremes, somehow wanting to please both sides of race. Therefore, as Susanna Ashton describes in The Southern Literary Journal: “Booker T. Washington may now be historically understood as one of the most divisive leaders of race relations in American history”. However, Washington stance was firm and to my point of view plausible. As he defends his views as a slave, but also the treatment received from his white owners: “my life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings. This was so, however, not because my owners were especially cruel. For they were not, as compared with many others”. Washington understood that being a slave was in fact due to the institution, which the nation unhappily had engrafted upon certain individuals whose skin colored was