Summary Of Chapter 5 Of Frederick Douglass 'No More Peck O' Corn

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Chapter 5, “No More Peck O’Corn” from Ronald Takaki A Different Mirror, offered a lot of incite on the journey that slaves took in order to gain freedom. It really raised the question of weather “free” slaves were ever actually considered free, and I the think the answer to this is a very clear and undeniable no. A few pages into the chapter, the harsh and unimaginable conditions that the slaves were forced to endure was explained in detail. Being woken up before the sun even began to rise, and then being required to do terrible, manual labor until it was too dark to see was inhumane. I cannot even begin to imagine what being overworked on top of being sleep deprived felt like, and it really made me wonder how so many of them were able to survive and endure it for such a long …show more content…

To make matters worse, on top of the workload, they had to withstand many different multitudes of torture and pain given to them if their work was not finished properly or if they lagged behind. Another part that I found most interesting about this chapter were the sections in which they described the slave to slave-masters relationship as anything but hostile. On many occasions it was explained that slaves were treated as children, which though I realize is very demeaning in some instances, still surprised me, especially in Frederick Douglass’s case. His first masters wife, Sophia Auld, truly seemed to look at him and, at least in the beginning, even treated him as one of her own. It’s possible that this friendliness was due to the fact that Frederick was most likely the product of a slave and her own husband, but it still baffled me. In other cases there was