Escaping the sickness of slavery

Review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass

This is memoir of the growth of an individual from the most brutish of slave lives to a free man who took pride in his work and his mind. While told as a narrative, this book is actually an essay on personal struggle and development: to respect himself, to change his circumstances, to be re-born. At that, it is extremely powerful and moving. The reader empathizes completely with his rage, his striving to grow, and his awakening. He came to the point where he would rather fight back than die slowly, never to be dominated in his spirit.

But it also points to the effect of slavery on the owners. While there are the standard cruel and selfish ones, who are attempting to "break" his spirit in order to domesticate him, the story of how it twists the souls of essentially good people that is the most interesting and shocking. It is like a sickness, their total and unresponsible power, that extinguishes their empathy and replaces it with the most horrible selfishness, as they debase themselves through cruelty. You get the whippings and routine humiliations, but also what that does to the perpetrators.

There are also many interesting asides, which are often philosophical. He points out the hypocrisy of southern Christians, who make the worst and most cruel and self-righteous slavers, all while justifying their behavior by the Bible. He also recounts how he expected that the "refinement" of the southern gentleman and their leisure would be imposable in the North, which he pictured as poor as the non-slave holding population in the South – but he discovers an entirely different kind of economic life, in which men worked and prospered and developed themselves even more than what he had observed on plantations.

But the most important thing is his recounting of his inner journey, which was encouraged by his learning to read as a way to overcome the ignorance that made for "contented slaves." In disobedience, he met secretly with fellow slaves in a reading group, whom he came to love as brothers. It is extremely moving and beautiful.

There is so much food for thought on the human spirit as well as wonder at how the US has evolved. My son and I read this together when he was in high school.

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