Stories of Young Slaves as Told by Themselves

2005, Lawrence Hill Books, 230 pages, illustrated by Kathleen Judge

My short biographies of slaves have largely come from this book thus far. There is a shame about such collections which results in most blacks not wanting to read about black slaves, and most whites not wanting to read about something that they have been made to carry the guilt for, even though they, and very likely their ancestors, are the victim of that very practice; for slavery has cursed and malformed the fabric of American society since its inception, and has doomed us all to a life suffused in hate, bitterness and guilt. Every American should read this book.

Growing Up in Slavery has 4 aspects which I will address.

1. The illustrations by Ms. Judge are very effective at evoking moods reflected in the memoirs.

2. The Introduction is a standard presentation of race-based facts, which continues the standard narrative that plantation Slavery in the American South was a ‘white on black free market phenomena’, not, as it was, state-sponsored terrorism for the benefit of the top 1% of the population and the determent of every other soul in that nation. Yuval falls flat analytically. But the facts he realities so clearly often contradict his assertions that chattel slavery was something as simple as race-crime. The author’s submission to pop-academic indoctrination aside, his presentation of facts is excellent, and so nakedly done that one could draw assertions opposing his from his text.

3. Yuval offers concise and informative introductions and summations of the circumstances, and later adult lives, of the subjects.

4. The stories of the children born to slavery are placed roughly chronologically. They are Olaudah Equiano, Moses Roper, Lewis Clarke, Frederick Douglas, William Wells Brown, Thomas H. Jones, Harriet Jacobs, J. D. Green, Elizabeth Keckley, and William H. Robinson. Through their words you will discover that slavery was more brutal than even racist black scholars admit, that blacks did buy and sell blacks, that whites were enslaved under the same system, that whites sold their own children, and that the typical slave owner was as much a slave to a morally and economically impoverished 5,000 year-old social system, as his much abused human property.

We modern celebrity-driven leftist-guilt-influenced Americans think of slavery as a massive whitewashed plantation system—evil, yet conducive to tranquility, and generating vast fortunes for a thriving free market economy in which the only un-free aspect was the black person.

If so, why did the slave states lack the economic capacity to clothe, feed, arm, and mount their troops for their ‘War of Succession?’

What American slavery really looked like through the eyes of the children born into it is more like a patchwork of modern America’s worst prisons, poorly connected by iron-age infrastructure, surrounded by trailer parks full of raging alcoholics raping and beating their few personal slaves, while half of the whites could only find employment as bounty hunters. The only people who had it easy were the ultra rich who owned hundreds of slaves and the bankers and industrialists they did business with.

For those who think that America was founded in opposition to the concept of the Iron-handed State, let William H. Robinson tell it like it really was, “Long after dusk we could see the statue of George Washington, which stood at Richmond, Virginia, with a negro boy chained at its base, and Washington pointing with his right hand, saying, ‘take the negro south.’”

Although the author pays politically correct lip service to keeping black-white hate alive, his subjects indicate not only how deep this rotten tree was planted, but that no one [below the top 1% I should say] in an un-free society is free, particularly not the people that are charged with keeping the rest down.