Frederick Douglas's Beloved: The Role Of Father

Slavery warps. It is a condition that perverts, distorts, and twists. But it does not replace. The condition of slavery never became the human condition; all slaves were still people first. Central to the concept of humanity is that of family -- and families, too, survived the rigors of slavery. When slavery ended, either for individual families that escaped or for the nation in 1865, families came out of the South that faced the hardships of racism and the scars of bondage. The family dynamic of African Americans transitioning out of slavery was one of constant flux, held together primarily by the mother, and characterized by a profound difficulty in communication between generations. This family dynamic, splintered by circumstance but still tightly bound, has been captured by authors from the era of slavery until modern times. Writers who experienced slavery firsthand, such as Frederick Douglass in his novel Narrative of …show more content…
Fathers of slave children could be either slaves themselves or masters, as children fathered by white men but born to slave women were still the property of the slave owner in most cases. Neither scenario afforded much involvement of father figures into the lives of their children. Just as children were taken from their mothers, slave men were bounced around different plantations regularly. While mothers were uninvolved, fathers were nonexistent, as described by Paul D in Beloved. “Mother. Father. Didn't remember the one. Never saw the other” (Morrison 124). Masters had no incentive to care for slave children, although favoritism was shown on occasion. Jacobs even consented to having a child with a different white man in an attempt to escape the fate of bearing her master’s son: “With all these thoughts revolving in my mind, and seeing no other way of escaping the doom I so much dreaded, I made a headlong plunge” (Jacobs 53). For a child still in slavery, having a father was a rare