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Introduction on slavery
Summary of frederick douglass life
Unwritten history of slavery
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Narrator: Sunday night. Douglass sits alone under a tall leafy tree. He looks up at the twinkling stars, as the cool wind gently blows the delicate leaves. Each star shimmering in the dark night sky. Douglass, with his back against the tree trunk, takes a deep breath and reminisces upon his life.
Frederick Douglass: *sigh* what has my life come to? How has it gotten to the point where I feel as though I don't want live anymore? Maybe…I shouldn’t live anymore. That way I can leave this wretched world forever. I could be far from a place of distress and misery. If died right here and now, would anyone care? Would anyone carry on the story of Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey? *Douglass stands up with a look of anticipation, as though he was
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waiting for someone to answer*. Of course not. *Douglass sits back down looking defeated*. As a slave, I am merely an object. My life has no significance in this world. All I am is just another waste of space. Another object. Another object in the hands of society. Another object that people destroy, inside-out. Another object, which people get tired of and throw away. I’m just a shell of my former self. I’ve lost all hope and no longer have any aspirations. I’ve lost my will to push forward. I’ve lost my will to live…………All I left is my experience, and my literacy. I have nowhere to go. I have nothing left. After all, all I am is a pathetic slave. Narrator: After a while of pondering, Douglass decided to go to sleep. He knew he wouldn’t take his life, even thought that seemed like a pretty good option at the time. Narrator: After a few days, Douglass had decided that he would attempt to seek help from his master. He left the plantation in an effort to receive help from Master Thomas. Frederick Douglass: Master Thomas please take me back. I cannot withstand this torture any longer. I fear that if I continue stay with Mr. Covey, I may cease to live! Master Thomas: What foolishness! I know Mr. Covey very well, and I know for certain he would not do such a thing! He is a very kind and good willed man, and I doubt that there is any danger of him killing you. Not to mention, you belong to HIM for a full year. So get moving. HE is your owner this year, not me. Now, go! If you stay any longer I may lose my wages for the entire year! Narrator: No matter how much Douglass pleaded, Master Thomas would not change his mind.
Eventually, Douglass went back to the plantation, filled with dread.
Narrator: A few days passed and one of Douglass’s friends, Sandy, had asked him to meet him in the forest. Sandy seemed exited to show Douglass what he had planned, while Douglass looked quite perplexed.
Sandy: Just a little bit further!
Frederick Douglass: Where are you taking me?
Sandy: You’ll see…*Sandy smiles as he puts his hand in his right pocket*
Narrator: Sandy and Douglass reach an area with a plethora of wild plants. Sandy bends over and rips off part of a root, and hands it to Douglass.
Frederick Douglass: *Douglass has his hands out holding the root* Um……Sandy? What is this?
Sandy: A root.
Frederick Douglass: No, I mean, I know it’s a root, but, what am I to do with this?
Sandy: *Chuckles* Keep this in your right pocket. It’s a very special root that has extraordinary abilities. I have my own that I’ve kept in my right pocket for the past few years, and I haven’t been beaten by a white man once! I urge you do the same.
Frederick Douglass: I don't think I want this………I don't see how this one tiny root can have such a large impact. *Douglass pushes his hands towards Sandy so he would take the root
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back* Frederick Douglass: *Pushes Douglass’s hands back to him* Keep it. It can’t do any harm if it doesn’t do any good. Narrator: Douglass finally accepted and immediately went back to the plantation. The days that had followed had been very peaceful. Mr. Covey had talked to Douglass with a kind and calm demeanor, and he hadn’t beaten him once. That is, until Monday morning. Douglass had been in charge of taking care of the horses, when Mr. Covey decided to sneak up on him. He had taken a rope and attempted to tie Douglass’s legs. Frederick Douglass: *Springs backwards* what are you doi- Mr. Covey:*Holding Douglass’s legs, pulls him towards the floor* Frederick Douglass: *Falls onto the floor* Mr. Covey: *smirks* I’ve got you now you little pest! Ha-ha! You’re going to get it now! Frederick Douglass: *Douglass suddenly grabs hold of Mr. Covey’s neck and begins to rise* No! This has gone on long enough! I will no longer let you treat me as you please! Mr. Covey: *Holding onto Douglass* Hughes! Grab him! Hughes: Yes, sir! Hughes: *Grabs rope and attempts to tie Douglass’s hands* I’ve got you now! Frederick Douglass: *Gives a strong kick backwards* Not quite! Hughes: *Stumbled backwards, his arms positioned slightly under his ribs, looking quite sickly* Ugh……Covey, you handle the rest……… Mr.
Covey: *Looks over at Hughes in shock, while slightly lessening the grip on Douglass* Hughes?!?
Frederick Douglass:*Looks back at Douglass* Do you intend to keep this up?
Frederick Douglass: *Looks at Mr. Covey* I will, if that is what it takes. You have used me as a brute, and a brute I shall be no longer!
Mr. Covey: *Leans towards a stick* Then so be i-
Frederick Douglass: *Grabs Mr. Covey by the collar and knocks him down to the floor* this ends now!
Bill: *Walks in on the brawl* Oh my goodness!
Mr. Covey: Bill! Help me!
Bill: Mr. Covey, sir! What can I do, sir!
Mr. Covey: Take hold of him, take hold of him!
Bill: *Slowly took two steps backward* Sorry, Mr. Covey Sir, but I was hired to work, not to whip other slaves. You can handle this on your own.*Walks of stage while Douglass and Mr. Covey continue to fight*
Narrator: After nearly two hours of fighting, Mr. Covey finally decided he had enough. He let go of Douglass, claiming that if he had not resisted, he would have whipped him half as much. The truth of the matter was that he hadn’t managed to whip Douglass at
all. Narrator: The next six months with Covey had went rather smoothly. He had not dared lay a finger on Douglass, for he feared that what had happened prior would happen again. This was truly, the turning point in Frederick Douglass’s career as a slave.
First Mr. Covey attacked him with a”long rope” grabbing Douglass by his legs trying to tie them up so that he wouldn't be able to
The hopeful and then helpless tones in Douglass' passage reflect his inner turmoil throughout the process of his escape from the wretched south. At first, Frederick Douglass feels the utter feeling of happiness covering every inch of his body and soul. However, he soon finds out that the rosy path has thorns that dug into his skin as freedom was dangled in front of his face through a tunnel of complete darkness.
One - The power relations between Covey and Douglass are inherently dissimilar to those between the typical black and typical white of the time period. As Douglass writes, “Mr. Covey was a poor man, a farm-renter. He rented the place upon which he lived, as also the hands with which he tilled it” (Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 420). Because “the enslavement of the Negro determined the position of the poor whites in the old South,” a white without any slaves or land to his name was more akin to an enslaved black than to a wealthy plantation owner in terms of social standing. This status, added to the fact that “the poor whites understood that slavery was responsible for their hopeless economic condition,” contributed to a
Through his disgusting state of once being a slave, Douglass uses figurative language to express his thoughts and emotions of being a slave, and becoming free. Douglass expresses himself in the first paragraph as “ a man transformed into a brute” as a result of Mr Covey “succeeded in breaking me[him].” Douglass defines himself as an animal through his explicitly harsh word choice, and seems to be degrades him from being a human being, who deserves desires and thoughts of his own. In contrast of this,
The narrative enables Douglass to flaunt his hard-earned education. As stated before, his diction brings pathos to his work. He describes his experiences in a way that lets his audience feel the indignity of being owned by another person. For example, D...
One of the amazing things about the story is the level of description and imagery that Douglass uses to describe the suffering around him. The excerpt spans a mere three days, but most of the text focuses on his abuse and battle with Mr. Covey. Douglass skips over the common parts of his life to further his case against slavery. By doing this, the Northerners rea...
In The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, emotional violence takes an aggressive toll not only on Douglass, but also his master Mr. Covey, his family, and fellow slaves. During his time with Covey, Douglass was affected deeply by the strain of slavery, especially in spirit and ways of hope. Mr. Covey was infamous for his reputation as a ‘‘nigger-breaker” and induced fear into slaves, emotionally scarring them (Douglass 53).
... trickery. When his term with Mr. Edward Covey ends on 25 December 1833, Douglass is appalled by the slaveholders forcing the slaves to drink wine and whiskey, since it was “a disgrace not to get drunk on Christmas” (44) and, when the Christmas holidays end, the slaves, who the slaveholder “cheats… with a dose of vicious dissipation, artfully labelled… liberty,” (45) is willing to go back to work, choosing to rather be “slaves to man as to rum.” While the slaveholders capitalizes on the slave’s ignorance, Douglass appeals to pathos, revealing the disgrace and detestation of the course of action for the “cunning slaveholders” (45); Douglass later forms his own form of trickery to combat with the slaveholders. When Douglass meets Henry and John Harris, Douglass utilizes their intelligence to form “a strong desire to learn how to read” (48), benefitting all three men.
The Narrative of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass is written to have people place their feet in the shoes of Frederick Douglass and try to understand the experience he went through as a slave. Douglass writes this piece of literature with strong wording to get his point across. He is not trying to point out the unpleasant parts of history, but to make people face the truth. He wants readers to realize that slavery is brutalizing and dehumanizing, that a slave is able to become a man, and that some slaves, like himself, have intellectual ability. These points are commonly presented through the words of Douglass because of his diction.
Frederick Douglass had moved into a new mistresses home who had never known of slavery. While she had initially taught him to read, fed him well, and looked upon him like an equal human being, she eventually forbade him from reading and whipped him at her husband’s request. The kind woman he had known became inhumane and degrading because that was required to maintain the unwarranted power over slaves.
Despite being a slave, he kept strong and eventually broke the chain of society. However, Fredrick Douglass experienced great “insecurity” and “loneliness” with his new freedom, and was upon a new “hunting-ground.” His new freedom brought other devastating factors, being a new state without any friends, which caused his loneliness. In this new state, he grew insecure because he was in a new danger zone where at any time his freedom could be rejected. With new freedom comes new obstacles, which are described in the diction of Fredrick Douglass.
This speech reveals that during the period that Douglass and Oakes claim that Douglass was lost, he was still an enthusiastic advocate for African Americans. At the same time, these few lines from the speech contradict what Douglass says in The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. It can be easily seen that he clearly did not believe that the American Anti-Slavery campaign or any other anti-slavery campaign should be obsolete, as he suggested in his third autobiography. After slavery was relinquished, Douglass’s audience changed.
The tone established in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is unusual in that from the beginning to the end the focus has been shifted. In the beginning of the narrative Douglass seems to fulfill every stereotypical slavery theme. He is a young black slave who at first cannot read and is very naïve in understanding his situation. As a child put into slavery Douglass does not have the knowledge to know about his surroundings and the world outside of slavery. In Douglass’ narrative the tone is first set as that of an observer, however finishing with his own personal accounts.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
As both the narrator and author of “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself” Frederick Douglass writes about his transition from a slave to a well educated and empowered colored young man. As a skilled and spirited man, he served as both an orator and writer for the abolitionist movement, which was a movement to the abolishment of slavery. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Douglass’s sole goal of his writings was to essentially prove to those in disbelief that an articulate and intelligent man, such as himself, could have,in fact, been enslaved at one point in time. While, Douglass’ narrative was and arguably still is very influential, there are some controversial aspects of of this piece, of which Deborah McDowell mentions in her criticism.