Slave narratives of Douglass and Jacobs: The search for freedom and personhood - Essay Example

? Slave narratives of Douglass and Jacobs: The search for freedom and personhood 25 August Slave narratives are primary sources that personalize the reality of slavery. Slavery can easily be reduced to the statistics of millions of people and families who suffered from this inhumane institution. Slave narratives, however, provide a human face for slaves and the physical, emotional, and mental tortures they go through, whether their slaveholders are sadists or not. This essay will analyze the purposes, main points, audiences, and similarities and differences of two slave narratives: Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The main purposes of these narratives are to inform the slaves, slaveholders, and society in general about their experiences of slavery and how inhumane it is to be a slave; to educate slaves that they can be free too, if they find the right support and faith; to highlight the importance of education to slaves’ freedom and identity; and to also explore their journey from being a property to being a human being. The main point of these narratives is that they expose that slavery is so inhumane that it dehumanizes both slaves and slaveholders/traders, with female slaves experiencing unique disadvantages because of their gender. Slave narratives serve personal and social purposes and have diverse audiences. These narratives serve to describe the individual and collective realities of slaves. For historians, these stories are rich sources of the intricate and intimate details of slavery, from their capture in other lands to their distribution and sale in America. The main audiences for Douglass and Jacobs are slaves, who must be awakened to their natural rights to life, freedom, and education. They are also writing to slaveholders and traders, because they must be shaken out of their convictions of the morality of slavery. Moreover, these former slaves write to inform and change the society; it must be inspired to eradicate the cancer that slavery is. Douglass explains that slavery has no rational basis, because it is based on the color of people’s skin and race. He also narrates how his master, Mr. Auld, have made him understand that education is key to freedom because it is decisive in attaining self-awareness and self-improvement. In Incidents, Jacobs narrates her life as a female slave and the double dilemma of being both a slave and a woman. As a mother, she makes painful decisions which she cannot justify, if it did not give her the freedom she needed to buy her children’s freedom. These narratives show the connection between slaves and other slaves, because they share the same tortures that no other human soul would have experienced. As slaves, male and females both lose their rights to freedom and independence. They work side-by-side day and night and do not even have sufficient basic necessities to have a respectable existence. Douglass relates how slaves get hold of little food and clothing for their strenuous toil. The child slaves are in worse conditions, because they do not have shoes or jackets. They are naked, but are expected to work as hard as adults. Jacobs describes the hunger that defines every slave’s working day: “The slaves could get nothing to eat except what [their masters] chose to give them” (Ch.1). These slaves work like oxen, but they eat less than oxen. Their physical degradation alone can dent their belief that they are human beings too. It was also ordinary for slaves to be killed or hurt as if they are not human beings. Jacobs remembers slaves who are flogged so roughly that they almost died: “Never before, in my life, had I heard hundreds of blows fall; in succession, on a human being” (Ch.1). Douglass also remembers the story of his Aunt, who was discovered with another man. He says: “[the master] commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor” (Ch.2). Slaves go through inhumane treatment because society does not see them as people, but as personal properties. Slaves are deceived so that they can hold on to their enslaved conditions. In Chapter 2 of Incidents, Jacob’s grandmother's mistress had always promised that when she dies, the grandmother would get her freedom. But when the mistress dies, Dr. Flint breaks this promise and puts Linda's grandmother up for sale. Jacobs and Douglass also talk about the lies spread about free states. Some say slaves die of hunger in these states. Douglass knows that these are lies perpetuated to keep them bonded to their slavery. Jacobs also discovers that free slaves can have a normal life, almost like a white man, but still delimited by racial discrimination. Lastly, Jacobs and Douglass are disgusted by how the Church uses the Bible to justify slavery. Jacobs finds the white church as a structure of hypocrisy, because it allows white people to put a yoke on fellow human beings. Society uses diverse deceptive methods to condition slaves that their only path is slavery and nothing else. All slaves crave for freedom, but not all can fight for it with their lives. Douglass remembers how slaves enjoyed errands, because it gave them a a glimpse of freedom, and so to do errands at the Great House Farm, “It was associated in their minds with greatness” (Douglass Ch. 1). He knows that his ticket to freedom is education, so he learns to read and write. Jacobs wants her freedom too, not just for her own, but most especially for her children. In Chapters 17 and 18, Jacobs endures physical and emotional hardships, in order to keep herself hidden for many months. She believes that her sacrifices, including possibly harming her family, are better than dying as a slave and watching her children be sold and treated as goods and beasts. These slaves cannot accept their conditions as chattel, and they are willing to make sacrifices to find freedom and to become a human being once more. Women, however, have worse experiences than male slaves, because their gender makes them vulnerable to rape and motherhood. Jacobs believes that being a woman burdens women slaves even more: “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (Ch. 14). Female slaves are susceptible to rape, cannot access the compassion of their mistresses, and do not have laws to protect them. Their male masters see them as sexual properties. Jacobs is afraid of the “jealous passion” of her mistress, which can never assure protection against “her master's footfall...” (Ch.5). Slaves know the predicament of women slaves, because if “God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse” (Jacobs Ch.5). Jacobs and Douglass acknowledge the distinctive hardships of female slaves. They are raped and bore their masters’ children, but because according to law, the mothers are slaves, their children are slaves too. This law ensures that slavery continues through the lineage of women slaves. Douglass knows that female slaves suffer more because of their sexuality: “[His master] is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom do any thing to please her…” (Ch.1). As mothers, female slaves are torn away from their children. Jacobs stresses that a female slave bears the double burden of womanhood and slavery: “[the female slave] may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies” (Ch.3). She gives examples of female slaves who are sold with infants milking on their breasts and who watch as their grown children are sold to different slaveholders. Through these laws and nonexistence of concern from white mistresses, female slaves are at risk of being raped and impregnated by their masters, not to mention, being hurt or murdered by their mistresses. Slavery is an institution that kills the human spirit of all concerned, slaves and slaveholders alike. It turns slaveholders into savage sadistic beasts, while slaves are reduced to being masochist beasts. These narratives account for the realities of slaves that are unfit for any human being. They aim to educate the masses of the wrongs of slavery. They want society to change itself and to free all slaves because slavery is immoral. These slave narratives give faces to millions of slaves, whom historians and present audiences can now distinguish as distinct human beings. Douglass and Jacobs also write for themselves. Narratives are “slave talk”; they seek to make sense of their experiences and to heal the wounds that slavery inflicted on them. These narratives have a personal objective too of cleansing the damaged spirit and reclaiming their rights to freedom and personhood. References Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23/23-h/23-h.htm Jacobs, H. (1861). Incidents in the life of a slave girl. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11030/11030.txt Read More