Slave Narrative

High school history books graze over slavery, just touching on the general details, but slave narratives delve into a more personal side of slave history that will truly make an impact on students. Slave narratives supply an incite into slave history that a textbook can’t provide. Many are written by current or former slaves, so they present a first hand experience of slavery that is valuable to education. The first hand accounts that slave narratives provide, give personal accounts of what life was like as a slave. Readers of slave narrative gain a more extensive knowledge of slavery than textbooks provide. There is more information given about the lifestyle of a slave, there is an incite into the different “types” of masters slave could have …show more content…
Frederick Douglass describes his different masters and experiences as a slave. He goes through unfairly harsh masters and harsh but fair masters. Frederick Douglass talks about all these different environments that slaves could have lived in, while still being able to give a personal point of view because he personally experienced them. He’d had masters that would allow their slaves to to whipped for “half an hour at the time; and this too in the midst of...crying children, pleading for their mother’s release” (Douglass, 55). He’d also had kind a kind slave owner, who would teach him how to read and he was allowed to run errands around town, giving him a sort of momentary freedom. His variety of masters through his life gives the reader of his book a good idea of the different lives slaves could have lived. Textbooks stick to the conventional knowledge of all slaveholders being malignant, but Frederick Douglass shows us that there were masters with no sympathy for their slaves and masters who are significantly more sympathetic. While life as a slave was horrible regardless, Frederick Douglass shows us that when slaves were stuck in that lifestyle, the master they had made a significant difference in the livability of the …show more content…
In the book, a group of runaways are captured by the negro hunters, and the master chose to kill on because he “will never be suitable” (Morrison 266). They burned the runaway alive while the other slave watched. Escaping was not easy for slaves, but neither was life as a runaway. In Beloved once the slaves escaped, their old master found them and came to claim what was his, which included the children of the slave. In order to protect her children from the life she had to live, the slave murdered her kids, or at least attempted to. While this story is not a first hand account and the events that took place in the book may not have happened to a specific person, they still accurately reflected the hardships of being a runaway