Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Reviews

• 
  Alex

  Frederick Douglass hardly needs to be defended, right? In case you haven't read this, and think it might be speechy or difficult to read, it's not. Douglass is smart enough to know he doesn't have to tell you how to feel; his story is plenty gripping enough without editorializing. And while he's an eloquent writer, and will occasionally engage in rhetoric, the thing's only 100 pages long; it flies. (Besides, he earns his rhetoric. Remember that hundreds of slave narratives were written. Douglass' is the classic because it's very, very good. They didn't pick his name out of a hat.) It's an amazing piece of work, and I can't imagine a reason not to read it.
  
  This edition also includes Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, which I reviewed
  here. It's smart to put them together; Incidents is very good, so this makes a great introduction to the slave narrative genre.
  
  For some context, the best essay I read was Caille Millner's "The Slave Narrative" in
  A New Literary History of America.
• 
  Michael

  I generally find writing from this time period difficult to read. Henry David Thoreau, for example, or Herman Melville, are like reading through oatmeal for me. I have long meant to read this particular book (really a long essay, weighting in at less than 75 pages), so yesterday, I did.
  
  A few months ago in New York an eighth grade girl read this book and wrote an essay about how Douglas's words were still relevant to her experiences in a large, poor, and urban middle school. The young lady in question wrote about how teaching slaves to read would eventually lead to their freedom, and how the teachers in her school were not teaching her or her peers very much of anything in order to keep them servile as adults. From her perspective, not much as changed.
  
  Her teachers were not pleased.
  
  I kept that story in mind as I read, and enjoyed, this powerful book. Slavery is hard to imagine, and every time I think about it, I find myself both bemused and horrified. I simply can't imagine a world where children could be torn away from their mothers, where women could be raped with impunity, and where men (and women) could be tortured, mutilated, or murdered at the whim of someone else. It sounds make-believe, like some horror story, but it was all too real (I had a similar experience reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich years ago).
  
  This was the passage that most stuck out for me:
  
  

  I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. ...he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

  
  
  Having worked in a difficult urban school early in my teaching career, I find that I can't truly blame the teachers who worked there. Many of them were indifferent to their students, but there were others who were deeply committed to educating the (virtually all) minority population of young people who attended. It seemed to me, and still does, that the circumstances of those children's lives--their health, economic, and social difficulties--made it almost impossible for them to thrive in the system we have set up for education in this country. Likewise, the system itself--the rules of the teachers unions, the unimaginable bureaucratic detritus, the top-down political decision making--created what educational researcher Chester Flynn calls "the blob." Our German inspired industrial school program may still work well for children who come to school with the necessary skills and supports to be successful, but for kids like the ones I worked with in Boston, or in places like the one where our determined young essayist went to school in New York...it's simply not sufficient.
  
  Where we go from there, I just don't know. I found this story to be both moving and disturbing in equal measure. I'm glad I finally read it. As for the young woman in New York (13 year old Jada Williams)...she faced such harassment from her teachers and the administrators in her school because of her essay (and the publicity it generated) her mother pulled her out. Where she is now, I have no idea.
  
  "A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people." -Frederick Douglass
• 
  Adam

  For years I have devoured anything I could about the U.S. Civil War and the sociology of the antebellum nation. I can't account for how I'm only just now reading these books.
  
  Frederick Douglass's oratory was one of the most persuasive forces for emancipation, as well as for the enlistment of black soldiers in the Union army, and is a beautiful thing to read (Northerners couldn't believe he had ever been a slave). I thus had high expectations for the account of his life from his own pen, and was not disappointed. I could tell from the first few pages that this would be a "hard" read. The writing is clear enough, but the subject is wicked enough. Being a true account, and representative of the burden of the most "well-treated" slaves, the violence is even harder to stomach--knowing that one man did thus to his fellow. Douglass's account is punctuated by his persuasive indictments against the "peculiar institution", and is dazzling.
  
  I assumed that Jacobs's Incidents would be interesting but not on par with Douglass's Narrative. Wrong. Have you ever cheered on the heroine and cursed the villain of a book? Read Incidents if you want that experience. Her "snippets" were written pell mell whenever she had the chance, in secret, and that format (each "chapter" lasting about three pages) adds to the urgency and motion of her story. Truth is stronger than fiction, in the details of her life and escape, to firmly plant the reader in his chair for hours, wondering how it will all end. Her life was so extraordinary that her autobiography--at publication and for years hence--was discredited as fiction (a discovered cache of letters eventually proved otherwise). Her Incidents is also notable for its breach of the social and publication taboos of the day. Namely, a black woman writing about and condemning the sexual mistreatment of women under a legal and accepted institution. Incidents is as much a feminist work as it is an abolitionist one.
• 
  Sara Jesus

  Um livro inspirador! Frederick Douglas, um escravo, que atreveou-se a sonhar com a liberdade. Nesta autobiografia, ele narra a sua infância separado da mãe e já exposto a violência. A sua chegada a Baltimore. Como a leitura e a escrita o modificaram. Fazendo-o ganhar consciência da sua condição. Mas é apenas quando é brutalmente ferido que decide fugir.
  
  Acaba por se tornar num grande defensor dos direitos dis negros e uma inspiração para muitos negros.
  
  Este relato choca-nos mas ao mesmo demonstra a determinação de um homem para mostrar que a sua cor não o difere dos outros. Um dos livros sobre escravatura mais poderosos que li!
• 
  Tim

  These two books are sometimes very hard going, but essential reading for Americans. We probably tend to think about slavery very much in the abstract, when we even think about it, but these narratives make it painfully palpable and very human. In a way complementary to Akhil Reed Amar’s brilliant description of the way slavery thoroughly corrupted the American political system (in his America’s Constitution), these books reveal in detail the thoroughgoing and extraordinary moral perversion slaveholding caused in individual lives – to some extent those of slaves, but much more those of slave owners, poor southern whites, and complicit northerners. Of course we also see the brutality, horrors and deprivations of slave life.
  
  Douglass’ narrative is better known than Jacobs.’ Among many other things, how he taught himself to write is a remarkable story of shrewdness and determination against all odds. Jacobs’ was an appalling life of virtually constant sexual harassment from an early age, which was undoubtedly a normal situation for many female slaves. What she went through to escape it is hard to imagine, and her single-minded determination to see her children free is incredible. The picture she gives of the distortions slavery caused in slaveholding families – lecherous men unconstrained by law or convention, angry and vengeful wives, gossip and whispering among white and black children and adults, children sold by their fathers to get the family features and relations out of sight and mind, and the increasing corruption of individuals’ characters this caused over time – again, hard going but essential reading. A peculiar institution, ordained by God, good for the slave and slaveholder alike. Indeed.
  
• 
  Alex

  These are the true accounts of the hardships of two individuals and their plights within the institution of slavery during the 1800's in the United States. Narrating their own stories, they also give a deep and thorough analysis of the "peculiar institution." The benefit of the two narratives being presented together gives a reader a well-rounded observation of the true nature of slavery in the U.S. With one account being from a man, and the other from a woman you learn of both of their great sufferings, but also of the sufferings that were unique to being a man, and the unique sufferings of being a woman from Harriet Jacobs' account.
  
  The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, is short, but extremely powerful. His story is sheerly inspirational. Douglass is not just a good writer for a former slave, but he is just simply a good writer, extremely intelligent. He is straight to the point, yet, I didn't feel that his expressiveness was lacking in detail. His analysis of slavery, the psychological nature of slaveholders, and his critique of the role of Christianity in the U.S. will be some of the deepest, most accurate stuff you will ever read. He also makes it clear that he is not attacking Christianity, but yet the manipulation of it, by those who wish to do evil. I am surprised that this great work has gone unknown to me for so long until now. I also didn't not expect his critiques to be so relevant even to the times we are experiencing in the U.S. today. Favorite quote: "You have seen a man be made a slave; you shall see a slave be made a man."
  
  Jacobs, Narrative is a bit longer, and she gives you much info on her background. In comparison with Douglass, who had few strong familial ties due to the effects of slavery, Jacobs goes more into the backgrounds of her parents, siblings, and grandmother. Her story presents a unique aspect of the effects of slavery on the family, both the slaves and slave masters, and on women (or at least more common to women) and how they were subject to sexual abuse by their masters. Jacobs presents a story of indelible strength in her enduring plight to gain freedom and keep her family together. Anne Frank lived in the annex for two years. Harriet Jacobs lived in the attic for seven! Why is this not required reading?
  
  Both stories are deeply tragic, yet motivational and enlightening. I only wish I had read them sooner so that I could be armed with the knowledge and examples that these two writers eloquently present. I gained a new appreciation for the freedoms I enjoy in my own life, and a renewed sense of purpose to pursue the freedoms that I still wish to obtain.
• 
  Rex Doomslayer

  Deep Book Review For Narrative Of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
  
  Written By Dale E. Myers II
  
  Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, was an African American abolitionist, born during slavery. He wanted to be educated at a young age, and so made friends with young boys who could teach him how to read. He then made a failed attempt to escape years later. Afterwards, he learned a trade. He then escaped and started a family. He became a leader in the abolitionist movement. He continued to fight for equality for all until his death in 1895.
  
  Mr. Douglass wrote his narrative in Lynn, Massachusetts. Following the Narrative's publishing in 1845, he went to the British Isles. He then denounced slavery before various audiences for two years. The narrative touched many people during that time, informing them about the struggle of slavery and changing their ways of thinking. His book is still popular today, almost 200 years later.
  
  The book’s central theme is to inform the reader about what he went through, all of his ups and downs, and to let them know what he experienced. It is like a journal, where he jotted down various points in his life. It is important because for us to understand what slavery was like, we have to view it from a slave’s perspective, and Mr. Douglass is a former slave.
  
  The book takes place in the 1800s, on a plantation where Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born. It then keeps going on to chart various stages of his life, from place to place, year to year almost. It talks about what he did from his birth to his death. A brief synopsis of the book is that he is a slave in body and mind. He is educated at an early age and realizes that slavery is unjust. He then escapes from slavery to fight against it with his words.
  
  His tone was informative and angry. I think that is because he experienced inhumane pain that he should not have experienced. He had a very cruel life of slavery, and that is what the anger is from. I believe that the informational tone is because he wants to inform the reader about slavery and what he experienced. That is what I believe.
  
  It changed my thinking because I have an idea of what slavery was like, the pain and all. I understand how it was for Mr. Douglass to a point, and what he went through. I am saddened to see how we were treated just because of our skin color. It disgusts me to think about how some people think that they are superior to other people, because we are all humans.
  
  I recommend this book to 14+, because of the bad language in it. It has multiple cuss words and bad terms that someone under the age/maturity of 14 should not be introduced to without proper guidance. Teenagers 14+ will be able to comprehend what is going on and interpret it to their own understanding. I still recommend this book to readers who can sit down with their parents and discuss what went on in the books, or just read it with their parents altogether.
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Karin Schott

  This narrative is page-turning. I found myself pausing, worried for Frederick, as he is assigned between different masters. I felt outraged for him as he suffered endless indignities and harm. And I felt sad that this narrative, written nearly two hundred years ago, is not simply a historical document that tells of a past time, but is still too relevant in these times.
  
  While there was a civil war to end slavery, the liberation and justice needed to compensate for such profound harm have never been settled. White supremacy, so richly portrayed in these pages, is still with us. And as a result, the strife our nation is experiencing is a loud echo of the past.
  
  We live in a time where other human bodies are under the control of the state through mass incarceration, low-wage exploitive labor, anti-abortion laws that threaten the free movement of pregnant people, and social service agencies that criminalize poverty and threaten family cohesion.
  
  Above all, the lesson from Frederick Douglass that we must continue to pursue in the course of justice is literacy. Douglass understood that learning to read is a dangerous thing when your oppressor needs you to stay ignorant of the larger world.
  
  
• 
  Jim Vander Maas

  A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
  
  Published twenty years before the Civil War, the autobiography is one of the first accounts of slavery by a former slave. Douglass depicts the dehumanizing life of slavery and emphasizes the role education played in his freedom. Douglass had a small window of opportunity to learn to read after being moved to Baltimore from the cruel plantation life. Mrs. Auld , who never owned a slave ,began teaching him to read before her husband stopped her. Douglass then learned wherever he could, this included from children on the street. The book emphasizes the hypocritical Christianity of southern slave owners. The more righteous a slave owner was the crueler he could be. You also could understand how fearful it was for a slave to escape even when living in such a harsh environment.
  A must read for every American.
• 
  Devon

  Douglass is the greatest American writer of all time and his speeches and narrative should be required reading in every school in America. Every word is carefully selected to induce the same passion and pain that he evokes in speeches. I can't stop reading his work it's that engaging and hard hitting. You can't teach or learn about American history without learning about Douglass. He flipped the abolitionist movement on its head, redefined what a freed black man "sounded like", and changed the course of reconstruction. He fought for American ideals and principles until his death, and he should be lauded as the greatest to ever pick up a pen as a result. Please don't let his legacy get washed away in the waves of time. Give this man his flowers and read this book!
• 
  Glenda Nelms

  both of these narratives were deep, emotional, and powerful. Details on life during the Slavery period.
• 
  Mitch Teemley

  Being a boomer, I was exposed to very little African American literature growing up. I've been trying for some time to fill in that gaping hole. The experience has been riveting and eye-opening. Douglass's "Narrative" is neither as long nor as complete as what we expect from an autobiography. It's not meant to be. This novella-length memoir was intended for use as an Abolitionist tract, and so its emphasis is appropriately narrow. Northerners, and even many Southerners, were dismally unaware of slavery's degrading effects. Appropriately, therefore, Douglass focuses on first-hand experiences that reveal the dehumanization cause by this despicable institution--on slaves, of course, but also on those who used and invariably abused slaves. The long range repercussions of which are still with us hundreds of years later.
  
  Riveting, heart-breaking, and essential.
• 
  Janet Gardner

  Douglass does not spare (Though neither does he dwell unnecessarily on) the harsher aspects of slave life—the routine beatings and even killings, the casual (for the owners) separations of families and beloved friends, the (often successful) attempt to keep the enslaved in a state of ignorance so deep that many cannot imagine another way. As with Harriet Jacobs, I was impressed by the literary skill of a man who risked the lash merely to be seen with a newspaper in his hand. It’s hard for me to fathom how the institution of slavery has been so easily accepted through so much of human history. As a species, we suck.
• 
  Meredith Olivia

  This is a very quick, but nevertheless important, read that does not withhold the horrors of slavery and reveals the ugly truth to American history.
  Douglass writes in such a way that makes the reader feel the emotion and carefully constructed thought behind each word. This is a novel that everyone should read so they might get a small glimpse into the barbarity of slave-holding.
• 
  emma

  it was heartbreaking to read and what happened is truly terrible. but since we read it for school i can't pick the book up anymore because we analyzed the shit out of it
• 
  William

  Oftentimes, I feel I can almost create a formula for the amount of dedication I will owe a work based on the year it was written. With anything earlier than 1960, I can add an extra 10% brain power required to understand the text with every previous decade. Something like that; the formula isn’t actually written out.
  
  This book does not fall into such a category. Despite being two centuries old, Frederick Douglass’s account of his life is salient, cogent and vigorous. While of course the content made me ache at times, the writing itself carried me effortlessly through Douglass’s experiences in a way I’ve rarely seen emulated. I can imagine this work read out at an abolitionist convention, and absolutely can resonate with the tour de force it would inspire when people heard it from the lips of Frederick himself.
  
  Coming off the haunches of Michelle Alexander’s seminal The New Jim Crow, I was further convinced of the use of racism as a tool to divide the working classes. Douglass has manifold examples of the way racism and slavery not only atrophy the integrity of the enslaved under its’ heel, but also the masters who squander their humanity to commit atrocity.
  
  One of the most clear in my mind is his description of the working class white dockworkers fearing for their livelihoods as more black workers entered their vocation. Instead of banding together to demand good working conditions for all, the lower class whites were cruel and protested to remove African American dockworkers in order to save their own jobs. These exacerbated tensions came from a perceived scarcity of work and wealth; a belief that works well with the desires of the wealthy and landed elite. It makes one contemplate: how often have similar scenarios played out, and how often does it continue to? And how can we begin to root out the lies that divide us and continue to impoverish the marginalized? Douglass doesn’t provide answers, but he does provide evidence, strength, and clarity. And across the sea of years and memory I am very grateful for that.
• 
  armin

  It was my first reading of slave diaries. Fredrick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s narration of their life as slaves and how it shapes your consciousness of the world around you is just so shocking. Moreover, it’s so touching to notice the level of these people’s self-consciousness and their sensibility about their surroundings. The account of the difficulties they go through is so vivid and the way they portray the violence the masters impose on them while considering it their absolute rights just puts you to wonder; how can someone feel themselves in such a position to exercise such level of malice on the other beings. Both authors give a precise account of elements that consolidate such beliefs of superiority in various people. You can feel the horridness of slavery to your flesh.
  This edition is very special; first of all because it is cheap! Secondly because there are two accounts, one of a man and the other a woman which helps understand the various disturbances the genders go through as slaves.
  This book complled me to read more about slave narratives as an essential part of the literature of abolition.
• 
  Lynn

  I wish I could say that Frederick Douglass' autobiography deals with a problem that has long since passed; however, I can see parallels to our own time particularly in the way that religion, specifically Christianity, was used as justification for injustice and oppression. Many of Douglass' owners were "devout" Christians, yet they would not hesitate to put men and women under the lash. They even have scripture that backed them up. For example see Luke 12: 47 "The servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready and does not do what the master wants will be beaten by many blows." (NIV)
  
  Christianity is still used today to justify war, poverty (the poor you will always have with you), and the subjugation of women and minorities.
  
  Would we have learned by now the lessons Douglass teaches.
• 
  Zachary

  The two works in this compendium complement each other fantastically, and both are unbelievable stories that simply must be read and experienced. Perhaps the most fascinating elements of these narratives to me were the discrepancies in attitude that both authors note regarding religious slave owners, and the differences that exist between religion and Christianity, and how those differences manifested themselves in the people of the north and south. To say that there are parallels in contemporary society seems to me to be an understatement. These are important works that are not just historical in nature, but are rather disturbingly, perhaps depressingly, relevant to the world we live in today. I highly recommend that anyone curious about what our world once looked like, and to a certain extent still does, should check these works out. We all have a lot to learn.
• 
  Liedzeit Liedzeit

  I must admit the name Frederick Douglass did not mean anything to me until I read Lepore’s history of America. And then, by chance, I found this book written by him in 1845. He was born into slavery. Talks about the misery of a life in slavery. There is not much new one can learn. So, the more religious the slave-holders were the more inhuman. I am not surprised.
  When he was still a child he was sent to Baltimore, where a couple had "inherited" him. They were new to slavery and the woman was very good to him, even taught him to read. And then Douglass tells us how, the accident of her turned into her slave-holder, made her evil. It makes one think. In the middle of the nineteenth century, how would you behave, if you suddenly possessed a slave?
• 
  Lianna

  I had to look up how he actually escaped since that part was left out.
  
  
  https://worldhistoryproject.org/1838/...
  
  "On September 3, 1838, Douglass successfully escaped by boarding a train to Havre de Grace, Maryland. He was dressed in a sailor's uniform and carried identification papers provided by a free black seaman. He crossed the Susquehanna River by ferry at Havre de Grace, then continued by train to Wilmington, Delaware. From there he went by steamboat to "Quaker City" — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — and eventually reached New York; the whole journey took less than 24 hours."
• 
  Sonja

  Everyone should read this book, especially Trump and his evangelical following. They could learn a few lessons. Basically, except for not being "slaves" any longer, African Americans are not treated any better than they were 200 years ago. Shame on all of us white people who haven't done more to help them - with better education, bank loans, freer voting rules, etc., and all the benefits white people have in improving their lot in life. We are all brothers and sisters and should treat each other like we want to be treated. It's not that difficult!
• 
  Ryan Carragher

  Born a slave in 1818 on a plantation in Maryland, Douglass taught himself to read and write. In 1845, seven years after escaping to the North, he published Narrative, the first of three autobiographies. This book calmly but dramatically recounts the horrors and the accomplishments of his early years—the daily, casual brutality of the white masters; his painful efforts to educate himself; his decision to find freedom or die; and his harrowing but successful escape. Great book shows the life of Frederick Douglass and his hard life.