Ragged Dick Compare And Contrast

Pretend for a day you woke up as a black-boot boy(vagabond) or slave, what would your morning look like? As a black-boot sleeping in a cardboard box with the cold air hitting against your frail flesh, you wake up from a man kicking you on the street. Scrambling to get ready and off to work you’d go – not changing your clothes or even eating a small breakfast. Running to find a job in order to earn some money to have dinner that night. Or imagine a beaten, tired slave waking up in a shed that’s falling apart at the crack of dawn. Either you’d start making breakfast for the masters’ family or picking cotton from the field. As all the slaves got ready for the day, you all feared that the master would get upset and whip one of you or perhaps today,

Both Douglass and Ragged Dick had very difficult lives never had it easy. They had a rough life where they weren’t treated like human beings or a part of the civilization. Since they were slaves and vagabonds, many people didn’t trust them. For instance, at the beginning of Ragged Dick, the boy was going to exchange money for a man and didn’t know if he could trust the young boy by saying, “I wonder whether the little scamp will prove honest”. Not only were these children not trusted, they were looked down upon similar to being a slave. Even when Douglass, was traveling in the Northern States, people were convinced that such an eloquent man was still a slave. This was because people looked down on slaves and thought of themselves higher than others, especially slaves and boot-blacks. In addition, both boot-blacks and slaves weren’t given nice clothing. They wore clothing that had holes and rips which was just one of many ways that illustrated their lack of social status. In Ragged Dick they describe the boys attire as a hand-me-down that was falling apart, “his pants torn in several places” and didn’t have proper clothing for the