Blog Entry 2

As I read through chapters three and four, I began to realize something I did not have clear in my mind before I began reading this book. That is, that there is no more accurate description of slavery than a autobiography of someone who lived it purely and entirely. Not even the best school textbooks can give us a more clear image of how slavery was at the time because the people who wrote those can't describe the experiences fresh in their mind. As the book progresses, it submerges us into the world of slavery without any sugarcoating. This is the real thing.

Ever since I was taught about slavery, I was told that slaves were mercilessly beaten and forced to work in the fields under the blazing sun. In other words, it was mainly focused on the physical abuse that owners would do to their slaves. The book does describe these abuses very graphically and I could have no better image of this after reading this book. However, I had never been so aware about the psychological distress these slaves were at all times. For example, Douglass says that Austin Gore, his owner at the time, had a garden full of fruits that slaves were not allowed to go to. Slaves were not fed properly and the garden was an easy source of food slaves could have resorted to in cases of extreme hunger, which I assume was the case most of the time. Gore had the garden surrounded by a fence with tar so that slaves that went through it would end up with their bodies stained and therefore get caught. I can't imagine being in such a situation in which I would have to choose between eating and getting beaten up or not get beaten up but be extremely hungry doing hard physical labor under the hot sun.

When Douglass talks about the fence that surrounds the garden, I was immediately reminded of the movie The Boy in the Striped Pijamas. The hungry slaves seeing food right in front of them but not being able to have it is a similar situation which happens in the movie. The young Jewish boy is hungry and has no method of entertainment while right at the other side of the fence the German boy is basically a spoiled brat that gets everything he wants. The feeling the Jewish boy felt in the movie must have been similar to the feeling the slaves felt when the say they couldn't eat the food that was right in front of them.