Perspective

In contemporary America, when one is asked about their thoughts on slavery and what it might have been like for former slaves during their enslavement, there is a certain impression that most people have. There is an idea of the violation of basic human rights. There are images of cruelty and brutality. Why is this concept of human cruelty synonymous with the term slavery? Where are we getting our information from? The Civil War ended in 1865. There are no living former slaves who can share with us first-hand accounts of their experiences. We can look to past recorded documents, but there is no one source of definitive information that will tell us all there is to know about the African American slave experience. We have to piece together data from various sources in order to get even a small understanding of the slave experience.

What does slavery mean? If you were to look the word up in the dictionary you would find that slavery is defined as “the state of being under the control of another person; the practice of owning slaves; work done under harsh conditions for little or no pay.” Do we have proof that slavery can not exist without “harsh conditions?” If we were to pull up every record relating to the African American slave experience, would we find that all of them indicate there was some kind of prevalent human cruelty? This certainly seems to be what is indicated by the definition provided to anyone who decides to look the term up.

“Maybe everybody’s Marse and Mistis wuzn’ good as Marse George and Mis’ Betsy, but dey was de same as a mammy an’ pappy to us niggers” (Jordan, 1997). “I never had no whitefolks that was good to me. We all worked like dogs and had about half enough to eat and got whupped for everything” (WPA Slave Narrative Project, 1937). These quotes have derived from separate documented interviews of two former African American slaves. These quotes are indicative of the individual interviewee’s overall slave experience as suggested in the examined text, if, of course, we were to take them at face value. As stated in “The View from the Bottom Rail” from the text After the Fact: the Art of Historical Detection, there are many (almost too many) variables to sort through before one can make assumptions about the historical accuracy of the given text. “…the search for the ‘true’ perspectives of the freed-people is bound to end in failure and frustration” (199).

Why is the search for the “true perspective” of former slaves doomed to end in failure? Why can we not just read the examined text and draw conclusions based on them alone? Are they not direct quotes from former slaves? An example of why we cannot is perfectly displayed in the reading from After the Fact. Susan Hamlin was a former slave who was interviewed twice in the given text. In one interview she talks about how her masters “were good people.” Then, in another interview, she claims, “W’en any slave wus whipped all de other slaves wus made to watch.” How could good people not only beat slaves, but have an audience when they did so? If we were only provided with one of these interviews we would only have half the story. Or perhaps the context of one interview is completely accurate while the other is completely farced for what could be numerous reasons. Maybe she was trained to never