A few extremely detailed accounts of a slave’s life exist because slaves were not allowed to write. However, some slaves were taught or learned how to read and write while they were still slaves. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs gave their account on their slave life in Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Both Douglass and Jacobs believed slavery to be a curse and a demon, but had different experiences with slavery.
Douglass grew up in a home where his mother was taken from him when he was an infant. He did the field work, mostly because he was a man, the work was exceedingly difficult. When he was young, he would see how cruelly his master and overseer treated their slaves. He said that his
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Her master and mistress treated her horribly, her mistress was jealous of her and her master would sexually harass her. Once, her mistress made Jacobs go out barefoot in the snow and her master and mistress threatened her with death. She focuses a lot on her sexual abuse throughout the book. She said that slavery is terrible to men, but more terrible for women. As a women, she did the domestic work as most women in slavery did. “Alas! slavery still held me in its poisonous grasp. There was no chance for me to be respectable. There was no prospect of being able to lead a better life.” To Jacobs, she had grown up with the notion that she would be a slave forever and so had no hope for herself to be free. For the sake of her two children, she became free and so did her children. Her complaint against slavery was that it was a curse and believed death to be better than slavery. She believed this because of her experiences with slavery, to her death was freedom and slavery was