Olaudah Equiano And Frederick Douglass

Robert Green Ingersoll, American lawyer and Civil War veteran, once said, “There is no slavery but ignorance” (“Robert Green Ingersoll Quote”). Slavery is the condition in which a person is held under involuntary servitude and exposed to undesirable conditions. It first began in America when millions of Africans were taken from their homeland and put on a boat to travel down the infamous Middle Passage. This photo on the right shows the journey millions of Africans had traveled in order to get to America (. This passage, however, marked the first of the many trials and tribulations slaves had to face. The conditions on the ship were grueling with many slaves dying or jumping overboard in order to escape the turmoil of the ship. Around thirteen

Slave narratives were autobiographies detailing the lives of slaves that became some of the most popular and controversial pieces of African American literature. Also, most slave narratives often dealt with themes such as the quest for freedom, religion, and a deliverance from the evils of slavery. Two of the most famous types of slave narratives were Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Fredrick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Equiano’s and Douglass’ narratives can be considered the epitomes of slave narratives because they try to have the audience sympathize with them, give descriptions of the brutal things slaves had to go through , and detail the harsh things specific slaveholders did to them; attributes present in most slave narratives. However, they differ because Equiano romanticizes slavery, and Douglass tends to be more realistic in his

In the fashion of the Realism period, Douglass decides to instead focus on a realistic depiction of the life he and millions of other child slaves had to go through. He states that most slave children had to go many cold nights without anything to wear because they were too young to work (240). This is a rare image that shows what some slave children had to where while they were working on the plantation (. Anyone reading Fredrick’s narrative during his time, their views on slavery aside, should have felt sorry for the many children who had to go nights wondering if they would live to see the next day. When it was time to eat, children were called in such a fashion “like so many pigs” and would eat the boiled corn mush given to them in a trough “like so many pigs” (248). Since so many of the children, including Douglass, were separated from their mothers, the dehumazation of children at a young age made them oblivious to the treatment they were being exposed to. Douglass expressing the gritty realism of what slave children had to go through is what made his narrative a perfect epitome of slave