A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Essay Example

Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” and Harriet Jacob’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” are both powerful stories of the lives and conditions of American slaves, written by those slaves themselves.  Even now, so many generations after the slave question was finally settled in this country, stories like these make for very powerful and emotional reading.  One of the themes which is particularly disturbing and which is a common one in both Douglass and Jacobs, is that of master-slave relations, particularly that of the relations between slave-owners and their female slaves, which were often based on sexual abuse.  Douglass notes that “The opinion was…whispered that my master was my father….my mother and I were separated when I was but an infant” (Douglass 4).  Harriet Jacobs notes that her master would whisper “foul words” in her ear (Jacobs 36 ) and to escape him and his attempts to sexually abuse her, she went so far as to hide herself in the attic of her grandmother’s house for seven years before escaping to the North.

Not all treatment of slave women was bad or sexual, however (even though human treatment in no way justifies slavery to begin with). In her interview for the Library of Congress project entitled, “Voices from the Days of Slavery”, which archived interviews and songs from former slaves, Alice Gaston of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, remembers her former masters with affection, saying, “And uh my missus was named Mrs. M. and my master was named Mr. F. I…Yes, sir, they treat me nice.  They treat me as nice as they could treat me….I was taught that a way by my old master. Don’t steal, don’t lie, and if you want anything, ask for it” (Sonkin 1).  Interviews like this can complicate the way history looks at slavery: the truth is, the relationships between the masters and slaves were probably not always based on fear of physical violence and did not always entail the sexual abuse of the slave women.  There might well have been affection on both sides in these relationships – although, again, it in no way excuses the institution of slavery even if that were the case.  The differences between the experiences of Douglass and Jacobs and of Alice Gaston just underscore of complicated an issue slavery really is.

Works Cited

Douglass, F.  “A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”.  1845.  Print.

Jacobs, H. “Incidents in the Life of  a Slave Girl”. 1861. Print.

Sonkin, Robert. “Interview with Alice Gaston, Gee’s Bend Alabama, 1941”.  Voices from The History of Slavery. Library of Congress. 1941. Web. 1 May 2014