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Treatment of slaves in America
The effects child abuse plays in aggressive adulthood
Experience of childhood
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Recommended: Treatment of slaves in America
Break Helm Village Break Helm Village acted as a home for Lia Hills for a long time, but it wasn’t where she was born, she lived in a cabin in the middle of the woods. In her childhood she grew up with no friends and never had a real social life outside of her family. Growing up alone wasn’t fun for Lia, she never really met anyone but her parents, of course, and they had countless long days and nothing to do but stand around. They ended up living alone because they weren’t welcome anywhere else, and eventually a group of hunters came around when she was around the age of 16, they took her from her family right there in that moment, Lia was separated from her parents and put into slavery. All Lia could feel was heartbreak Life wasn’t easy …show more content…
She hated it there, so much that Lia felt as if all the hard work was on her shoulders. She got the most attention because she was the first to arrive, but she didn’t want that. Lia seemed exhausted all the time, I assumed that of course, because everyone was worn out and tired. She would be in charge of crops everyday all day. The other slaves never really talked with her, but they respected her, she was younger, but yet somehow did the most work. So many long hard days in the village kept adding up, and they were just too much for her eventually and others saw that. She ended up becoming so exhausted that she passed out in the middle of working and she was beaten all night, everyone could hear her screams. Lia was very confident that someday she would be free and that maybe if she worked hard enough, they would let her go and of course being hungry and dehydrated can make you easily manipulated. She soon enough found out that it would never happen. Two years later she was eighteen and didn’t get anything special but 18 lashes. She was tired of it, all of this work for what? To be beaten, no way she was dealing with it any longer. On day 854 she had an idea, she knew the crops better than anyone which means she would know what crops were good to eat and what …show more content…
She wanted to fight back for once, make the power shift just for a little. Her and the others slaves came up with the idea of poisoning all of the masters. How were they going to do this you ask? Well, they knew they don’t get to eat what they pick so they purposely picked bad food for their masters to eat hoping they would get sick. Week after week they picked and picked, hoping that this would work. Then the day came people started getting sick so the village went under urgent care they waited for the right moment to run for their life. They ended up waiting three more weeks until Lia said it was time they trusted her with their lives. The guards and masters were getting more ill every second, the next day in the middle of the field, Lia clapped everyone heard and suddenly 24 slaves ran for the wood. She was energized and excited dust flying through the air, her blonde hair and beautiful dark skin racing through the fields thirsty for freedom. Some slaves fell and were too tired to continue and she would even stop to help some up. Carrying two separate slaves on her young shoulders, she felt exhausted, Lia wanted to just collapse to the ground but she kept going. Lia believed they were going to make it, until
The black women’s interaction with her oppressive environment during Revolutionary period or the antebellum America was the only way of her survival. Playing her role, and being part of her community that is not always pleasant takes a lot of courage, and optimism for better tomorrow. The autonomy of a slave women still existed even if most of her natural rights were taken. As opposed to her counterparts
Bales and Soodalter use this to their advantage very effectively by using a multitude of personal stories from people who went through slavery. They tug at your heart strings by starting with Maria, who was 12 years old when she was taken into slavery for seven months by Sandra Bearden. During that time she was reportedly “ . . . dragged into hell. Sandra Bearden used violence to squeeze work and obedience from the child.” (722). Bales and Soodalter begin by giving you an emotional connection with Maria by telling a short story of her life growing up with her two loving parents, and small details of their house and living conditions. After the backstory is established, it goes straight into the accounts of beatings and torture endured by Maria, to quote “ . . . Sandra would blast pepper spray into Maria’s eyes. A broom was broken over the girl’s back, and a few days later, a bottle against her head . . . Bearden tortured the twelve year old by jamming a garden tool up her vagina.” (722-723). The inclusion of the tortures paints an image of how horrible slavery is, and evokes a sense of dread, despair, and helplessness for Maria. Bales and Soodalter not only state the tortures but they follow the text immediately by stating “That was Maria’s workday; her “time off” was worse.”
To conclude, with the Lees being Hmong and not wanting to conform to society and abide by the way things works, I feel Lia’s fate was inevitable. The doctors did as much as they could, but in the end, it still wasn’t enough to prevent Lia from going brain dead. Language and communication may have been the one thing that caused Lia to suffer because the doctors couldn’t understand the Hmong and the Hmong couldn’t or refused to understand the doctors.
The first thing the slavers do is to strip their prisoners naked, since they treat the people that they capture not as humans, but as a commodity from which they want to gain a profit. They train their prey from the moment of internment, “they began with humiliation, they tore the clothes off our backs” (Hill 29). Aminata is a Muslim, and the reader is able to ascertain in the first pages how full of pride her people were and how much they valued their families. Women were the main workers and Aminata was trained from her mother in being a midwife. The village life is shown as a normal community encompassing jealousy and other customary happenings. When Aminata first is captured, she becomes an orphan, since the slave traders murder her parents. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to humiliate somebody means “to lower or depress the dignity or self-respect of; to mortify” (humiliate). The first thing the captors do to the newly captured is therefore to take their dignity and consequently their humanity away. The captors make it clear to the caught that they see them as a commodity; humans are wares that they plan to sell in order to make money. They are not...
“The soul-caller in Lia’s healing ceremony, began to chant, “Where are you? Where have you gone? . . . Come home to your house. Come home to your mother . . . Come home. Come home. Come home.” Ironically and tragically, Lia would never come home, because her brain had been lost forever.
Primarily, Celia’s story reveals many difficulties that were particularly faced by female slaves. In no
The bitter cold bit against the starved girl’s skeletal body. She was tired. Her parents discussed ways to get to good lands. They told her the only way to have a better life was to sell her into slavery. The girl, only ten years old was silent. She dreamed of fine clothing and good food. The girl went to the House of Hwang. She was too ugly to be in sight; she was kept in the scullery. All dreams of any kind were lashed out of her young mind. Mistreated, beaten, and underestimated, young O-lan learned to work hard and became resigned to her fate. One day, the Old Mistress summoned her and told her that she was to be married to a poor farmer. The other slaves scoffed, but O-lan was grateful for a chance to be free - they married. O-lan vowed to return to the great house one day in fine clothing with a son. Her resolve was strong; no one could say otherwise. Her years of abuse as a slave had made O-lan wise, stoic, and bitter; whether the events of her life strengthened or weakened her is the question.
torturing, abusing, and treating her as someone at a status even lower than the servants.
Even though this meant that she would not be able to see or interact with her children for all that time. The pain that she feels is evident when she says, “ At last I heard the merry laugh of children, and presently two sweet little faces were looking up at me, as though they knew I were there, and were conscious of the joy that imparted. How I longed to tell them I was there”(97). She tolerated being locked away in an enclosed dark space for 7 long years in order to free her children from the current master that owned them as slaves, showing how having someone to put ahead of yourself makes you stronger and more resilient as a
Abuse, rape, humiliation, embarrassment, assault and all of the other things that came with slavery scarred and scared Sethe so bad that once she was freed she attempted to kill all four of her children, because she was so afraid that they would have to live a life in slavery like she did (Heffernan). When Sethe was a slave the Schoolteacher’s nephews held Sethe down and stole her breast milk, like she was a cow. Sethe was taken away from her mother at a very young age and she doesn’t remember her at all, many other families were broken up the same way also (Spargo). There were slaves owners who were kind to slaves at times, like Mr. and Mrs. Garner who would be nice until they got behind closed doors there they would treat their slaves as if they were wild animals that were trying to invade their property.
Women slaves were subject to unusually cruel treatment such as rape and mental abuse from their master’s, their unique experience must have been different from the experience men slaves had. While it is no secret that the horrors of the institution of slavery were terrible and unimaginable; those same horrors were no big deal for southern plantation owners. Many engaged in cruelty towards their slaves. Some slave owners took particular interest in their young female slaves. Once caught in the grips of a master’s desire it would have been next to impossible to escape. In terms of actual escape from a plantation most women slaves had no reason to travel and consequentially had no knowledge of the land. Women slaves had the most unfortunate of situations; there were no laws that would protect them against rape or any injustices. Often the slave that became the object of the master’s desires would also become a victim of the mistress of the household. Jealousy played a detrimental role in the dynamic the enslaved women were placed within. Regardless of how the slave felt she could have done little to nothing to ease her suffering.
One important psychological toll of slavery is fear of slave owners, abuse, and of losing everything. Many slaves lived in fear throughout their life and some of them learned to accept the fear. Sarah lives with constant fear throughout the story. The only person she has left is Carrie, her daughter who cannot speak. Sarah’s husband died and three of her children were sold. Here we can see that Sarah accepted the life of slavery out of fear: “She had done the safe thing-had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid.”(145) Many slaves during that time seemed to make themselves accept their life. They would accept and behave in order for their family and their own safety, although the slaves were never always safe and still risked being separated from their family.
She focuses not only in the obvious forms of resistance, but also its disguised forms by utilizing resources such as slave narratives and interviews, papers and journals. She demonstrates how enslaved people threatened the control of plantation owner’s space, time and movement through movement of bodies, objects, and information. Her work exhibits extended research of analysis on already researched topics. Camp gives a new angle on these already researched topics by providing a deeper analysis as if she knows what these enslaved women truly think. Thus, successfully showing the efforts of black women trying to establish ownership of their own body, showing their hope for freedom, and expressing their emotions as a way to show that they are more than just the price they were bought
Often slaves were traded like livestock and forced to relocate from their familiar to the unknown. Female slaves were often raped by their male owners. Any offspring from such encounters suffered additionally due to resentment from the owner’s wife and were also often forced to relocate. Food and clothing were meagerly provided. Slave labor was incessant. Abuse and brutality were rampant. Beatings and whippings were common place. Numerous slave killings were never brought to justice. Fear and hopelessness knew no bounds. In this environment of both physical and mental control, slaves were made to fear for their own safety too much to attempt to stop the brutality. Through this dehumanization, they became virtual participants in the
In conclusion, women were considered property and slave holders treated them as they pleased. We come to understand that there was no law that gave protection to female slaves. Harriet Jacob’s narrative shows the true face of how slaveholders treated young female slave. The female slaves were sexually exploited which damaged them physically and psychologically. Furthermore it details how the slave holder violated the most sacred commandment of nature by corrupting the self respect and virtue of the female slave. Harriet Jacob writes this narrative not to ask for pity or to be sympathized but rather to show the white people to be aware of how female slaves constantly faced sexual exploitation which damaged their body and soul.