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Essay On Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl

820 Words4 Pages

“"We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” - Martin Luther King, Jr. There is not a single institution that has caused more suffering, more pain, than the institution of slavery. Slavery is culpable for immense death, horrific physical and sexual abuse, and generational trauma that still persists today. This abomination is dissected in its entirety, through the various slave narratives and memoirs that have been inked out. These narratives share many aspects among them. The most depicted aspects are, the destruction of familial bonds which creates tremendous trauma, the dehumanization of human beings and the resistance and strength the enslaved African Americans employ against their oppressors. In nearly all narratives of enslaved …show more content…

In the narrative of “The Life of Frederick Douglass”, it states “[food was] put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called… Like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush” This text reveals that slaves were basically like animals to their masters and treated as such. Douglas would also state that they were branded and that they lived in unsanitary conditions with little food. Another narrative that has the same nature of treatment is, “Incidents In the Life of a Slave Girl”. In this text the author, a slave girl, states that a favored punishment that a master would employ against his slaves was “to tie a rope around a man’s body, and suspend him from the ground. A fire was kindled over him, from which was suspended a piece of fat pork. As this cooked, the scalding drops of fat continually fell on the bare flesh.” This clearly shows that the torture given to enslaved Africans is not even fit for animals. Furthermore, the author of this text remarks on how slaves could not even choose who they fall in love with. Lastly, we can even see the trend of dehumanization and belittlement in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson argues, “blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind." Considering that Jefferson considered himself a benevolent slave master; which was the exception not the norm, demonstrates that slave masters were much

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