Compare And Contrast Frederick Douglass And Olaudah Equiano

Writers like Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass were different from other slaves in the sense that they were educated and used it as a tool to talk about the horrors of slavery. These writers approached their predominantly white readership by narrating their experiences as slaves and how they were negatively impacted by it. For example, Frederick Douglass never knew his mother nor his presumably white father. And because children had to follow the condition of the mother, he was meant to be a slave for life. In his writing, he also described how initially his mistress was teaching him how to read and write, however she stopped after his master told her not to. Suddenly, her attitude towards him learning became even worse than his master’s.

Both of these writers felt responsible to inform their white readership of the hardships slavery had on not only them but on other slaves. For example, Olaudah Equiano experienced being taken away by white people from his country. He even found himself wishing to be back at his former slavery in preference of his “present situation”. He states, “...I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, not had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death to relieve me..”(130). He further states, “Two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely” (130). This demonstrates how he was in an unknown situation since he was captured by white people who flogged him “severely” because he did not want to eat. By describing such experience, Equiano demonstrates the hardships many slaves had to go through in order to survive. In his case, he was taken away by these people he had never seen before, making him feel “filled of horrors of every kind”