As the title says, we're approaching the end of the 52 list, I actually have more blog posts than books to read, but I plan to be caught up this week or next week in all respects.
This biography was incredibly short, 86 pages if I remember correctly, but it was only about Frederick's life as a slave, whereas other biographies cover life after slavery. So it makes sense that it would be much shorter than normal.
As always, reading about how slaves were treated made my blood boil, and because of that the book was one I was happy to be done with quickly. Thankfully this book, though infuriating in it's content, provided more detail on the slave situation then other books. Perhaps since this was written by an actual slave instead of someone trying to write about slaves there is less of an urge to censor the material and try and preserve the pride of the white race. After all at the time this was written there were two types of people, slave owners who would either not believe a black could write or would burn any black book, or the abolitionists who were appalled by slavery and would likely be disturbed by such humiliating knowledge of how it works. The majority of people probably read books written by whites about black slavery that had some censorship to make it seem like something that came from hell, but from a higher level of hell then it actually came from. As a race people don't like owning up to their wrongs, so even the ones trying to expose the wrongs of their race would be restrained in doing so.
A black slave recently liberated from slavery doesn't have these restraints though, if anything the built up resentment towards slave owners would make his descriptions even more graphic. Since it's not the pride of his race that he's smashing he has no need for censorship.
That's my theory about why this book had so much more detail than normal, but now it's time to talk about some of the details themselves.
It's been established beyond a doubt that slavery was evil, slaves would be worked to death for nothing more than just enough food to survive, they would be treated like property and be abused maliciously. As if this weren't bad enough, it seems some slave owners neglected to even provide enough food for their slaves to survive.This is not a surprising new concept to me, as considering how much whites hated their black slaves it doesn't seem like much of a stretch of the imagination, but it is the first case I remember where I have actually encountered such a situation.
Also, several books ago I expressed my distaste for the actions of organized religion, and I provided several crimes against humanity committed in the name of religion. Now it appears that in the South religion was again used as the ultimate refuge of evil. Frederick describes in detail how religious zealots made the most brutal masters. He states that these masters use religion to justify their heinous actions to an extent that they never could have without it. One example he gave was when he watched his master whip a girl over some minor transgression until she bled, and then continued to whip her mercilessly until he was tired. His justification was a passage from the bible that read "he who knoweth the will of his master, and does it not..." I forget the rest, something about severe punishment. Not being very knowledgeable about the bible I can't say what that passage was actually meant to say, but I'm pretty sure it was not meant to say "if you enslave someone for their whole life and they don't behave perfectly the whole time you can whip them until they're mutilated for the rest of their life or until they die of whipping."
When Frederick learned to read and write and attempted to teach his fellow slaves religion their schools would be raided and broken up by the practitioners of that very religion. Fredrick wastes no time in pointing out the sick and twisted irony there.
On a (somewhat) more positive note, not all slave owners were malicious demons incapable of kindness. Fredrick was at one point a slave to a carpenter company, and through a series of events his owner reluctantly paid him a whole quarter, a sum which at that time was a ludicrous amount of money to pay a slave. Frederick had worked hard and earned much more money than that, but he says that the concept of slavery was so deeply ingrained in Southerners that being paid a quarter was an indicator that his master was kind and believed he deserved the whole sum, but couldn't pay a slave that much money due to social pressure. This took place during a time where white workers were growing more and more hostile to the black slaves of the company, indicating that the social pressure to not pay Fredrick his due was even greater than normal.
This raises an important question, we arbitrarily classify slave owners as evil, greedy, whatever negative term you specially reserve for the lowest of the low in your life. This man who paid Frederick shows what was at the time incredible kindness and compassion, so can we say that he was an all around evil man? It's a case of nature vs. nurture. This man was raised in a society where slavery was the norm, justified by countless means, and practiced by all his peers. The natural result of this is that he'd be raised to believe slavery was right, but the cruelty of some slave owners didn't fit in with his (apparently) kind nature. So he was doing something we view as evil, but it didn't automatically make him evil himself. I guess the lesson to take from this is "don't judge a book by it's cover," even though slavery is probably one of the most ugly covers you can slap onto the book of a person.
Frederick also details how slave owners kept slaves from revolting. The method is ethically appalling, but my rational mind is forced to admit it is rather ingenious. The first and most crucial part of the process is to keep blacks as uneducated as possible, simple enough, those who know nothing can dream of nothing else. The rest is a series of unrelated things that lead to a broken slave. One such thing is the giving of a holiday at Christmas, during which slaves are discouraged from working and encouraged to drink and party, the whites would get the blacks drunk and create an illusion that this is what freedom was like. The next day the blacks go back to work with awful hangovers, uneducated as they are they make a connection between freedom and the feelings of a hangover without realizing the connection between being drunk and a hangover. The end result is the slaves who fall for this trick becoming appalled with freedom and, unbelievable as it may seem, preferring slavery.
Another trick that was widely used by whites covers pretty much everything else. If a black complains about a lack of food his/her owner can't very well deny the slave more food for fear of a revolt. So the owner pretends to graciously allow the slave more food, then orders a large amount of food and orders the slave to eat it in a set period of time that is far to short to conceivably eat it in. When the slave reports that he can't eat that much food he is whipped for being hard to please, the request for more food does not come again. The same principle was used on slaves who would steal a certain favorite food, the owner would order huge amounts of the favorite food and force to slave to eat until they were sick, the thievery would then cease.
The context is awful, but the principle is ingenious. As I am writing this blog I am reminded of the book "Brave New World," in which the method of conditioning people who don't know any better to hate certain things was a central concept. The basic principle is virtually identical, though the scale of it's application and the methods are vastly different, which is to be expected in a science fiction novel being compared to real life.
Unfortunately I have run out of things to say about this book. I do feel the need to take a moment to appreciate the oddity that an 86 page book about a subject I have read about so many times it has become repetitive and boring has yielded one of the most long and full blog posts of the bunch. I guess big things often come in small packages like this.
Well I'm off for now, I'll be blogging again soon, so if anybody is actually following this, stay tuned!
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