Slavery in the United states
Image from Weallbe.blogspot.com
This week in class we are learning how it was to be a slave in the old times. To get a better idea of the way slavery worked, we are reading a book called Kindred by Octavia Buttler.
Long ago, blacks and whites were treated differently. Blacks were slaves to the whites. The basic punishments of slaves for the usual crimes such as theft and absence from work were a ring around the ankle, imprisonment in the dungeon, an iron crook around the neck and sometimes the breaking of bones. Harriet Jacobs had a book called Incidents in The Life of a Slave Girl. She explained how there was a planter in the country who had 600 slaves. He treated them like they were nothing. A favorite punishment was to tie a rope around the slaves body and suspend them from the floor. A fire used to set above slaves and it was cooking a piece of fat pork. As it cooked, the immensely hot drops of fat repeatedly fell on their flesh. Another house slave Lewis Clark in Kentucy described some punishing methods in his autobiography. Overseers would use anything to beat slaves, including brooms, tongs, shovels, and even the heel of the slippers.
The law didn't protect the slaves and that way, the overseers were able to do as they wished to their slaves. The overseers even bullied the slaves into increasing productivity. If they thought they were lacking activity, they would use the whip as a way for punishing the slaves. The acts of the overseers scared the slaves to not rebel against their owners.
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