Short Story Of Frederick Douglass 'The Slave Girl'

It is said that compassion is the result of shared suffering, and that in feeling another’s pain, understanding is born. Brutal beatings, heavy labor, starvation, separation and suffering were the realities of slavery for many African-Americans in the South in pre-Civil War America. Through their shared suffering, many slaves were able to develop strong emotional bonds and experience deep feelings of compassion for one another. Throughout the course of one’s life as a slave, it seemed that witnessing and experiencing beatings and lashings was inevitable. Those who fell and those who would fall under the lash all shared a wordless bond formed by this defining feature of their bondage. When Frederick Douglass was a young boy, he was exposed …show more content…
In her biography she recounts her own particular pains as a female slave (which may safely be left to speculation), but then changes her writing to reference more generally, “the slave girl” (11) and her suffering at the hands of “fiends who bear the shapes of men” (11). She goes further to explain that, of sin and sorrow: “in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.” (11), referencing the birth of children born of adultery and rape between a slave woman and her master. She then tells of how the young slave girl will learn too quickly why her mistress so hates particular slave women and children, and that she too, will likely be doomed to suffer the same treatment from her master and subsequently mistress if she is “cursed” with beauty. (11-12) Throughout this whole telling, she spoke of the phenomenon as a universal pain, being experienced by “the girl” or “she”, making it clear this pain was shared amongst many women in bondage, and she was only one of many who had been subjected to it. She shared a bond of understanding with the countless women who had suffered this cruel reality, and so was able to tell it from an open perspective for all of …show more content…
However, it goes without question, that much of what these authors had to speak of was general amongst the enslaved, as even in their use of language in their writing, they made it apparent that that which they felt was felt by many of their status, and as they suffered these similar fates, they suffered each other’s pain. One could not feel the same agonies of slavery as a brother, a mother, or even a stranger, and not understand the hell in which they lived and the anguish and despair that gripped their hearts. No, in the suffering they shared with others, these authors were affected by, and understood, and remembered, and consoled, and feared, together with their fellow slaves. The fellowship of pain and its products are stronger than any