Chains Isabel Quotes

During the times times of when the founding fathers lived, the slaves they brought in suffered from the chains on their hands and being dragged by their owners. In the book, Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, the protagonist, Isabel, is one of those slaves. She was taken away from her home and was sold with her family when she was only 1 year old. Curzon is a slave who fights for the patriots in order to gain his freedom. Isabel and Curzon are bound by their chains from their lives. Even as their experiences may be different, they share many chains events that bind them together. This is shown through their scars, their quest for freedom, and their imprisonment.

In a time period when women were considered inferior, as were blacks, it was unimaginable the horrors a black woman in the south had to endure during this period. African women were slaves and subject to the many horrors that come along with being in bondage, but because they were also women, they were subject to the cruelties of men who look down on women as inferior simply because of their sex. The sexual exploitation of these females often lead to the women fathering children of their white masters. Black women were also prohibited from defending themselves against any type of abuse, including sexual, at the hands of white men. If a slave attempted to defend herself she was often subjected to further beatings from the master. The black female was forced into sexual relationships for the slave master’s pleasure and profit. By doing this it was the slave owner ways of helping his slave population grow.

This paper discusses the experiences of African American Women under slavery during the Slave Trade, their exploitation, the secrecy, the variety of tasks and positions of slave women, slave and ex-slave narratives, and significant contributions to history. Also, this paper presents the hardships African American women faced and the challenges they overcame to become equal with men in today’s society. Slavery was a destructive experience for African Americans especially women. Black women suffered doubly during the slave era.

Women were not only used for their labor, but were also exploited sexually. Slave owners felt they had the right to use black women for their own sexual desires, and felt they had the right to use their bodies for slave breeding. This obscenity between the master and slave were not only psychologically damaging for black women, but would also lead to physical abuse. In her narrative, Ms. Jacobs gives us a firsthand description of the abuse that would occur if she were to upset her master, “Some months before, he had pitched me down stairs in a fit of passion; and the injury I received was so serious that I was unable to turn myself in bed for many days”

In these two tales of brutal bondage, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the modern reader can decipher two vastly different experiences from circumstances that were not altogether that dissimilar. Both narratives tell the story of a slave gaining his or her freedom from cruel masters, yes, but that is where the most prominent similarities end. Not only are they factually different, these stories are entirely distinct in their themes.

Moans of anguish fill the air, a man has fallen down from intense labor and is getting whipped to get back up. The man tries to get up, desperately pushing himself off the ground, yet the whip lashing into his body gives him no such opportunity. Eventually he falls flat, never to get up again. The person who was whipping him shrugged, “He was a waste of food anyways.” This was the life for a slave in the South before the Civil War. Destined to work in chains until they weren’t of use to the owner. In this essay I will prove that the North learning of the harsh treatment of slaves through the Fugitive Slave

Slave punishment was bad in both plantations and cities, but the punishment of slaves was relatively less severe in cities. Slave owners on plantations treated their slaves terribly. “Such abusive owners might whip their slaves dozens of times, creating extensive blistering on their victims’ backs” (McNeese 78-79). This quote is one piece of evidence that detailed the horrors and brutality slaves had to face. Slaves were never safe from punishment, especially if their owners were known for being cruel to slaves. When Douglass lived on the plantation he witnessed many horrific events at a young age. Douglass explains how even the most minute offenses can cause severe punishment. If a slave ate a piece of fruit that they were not supposed to then they were whipped. If they did not brush the horses in a certain direction then they were punished. If they snuck off of the plantation to see someone they loved then they were punished. Any offense, no matter how small, had an extremely severe punishment. Slave owners were known for being brutal, and Douglass' owner was no exception to that rule. When Douglass was a young child, he witnessed his aunt get whipped by their owner.

As a young child, Frederick Douglass was introduced to the acts of violence towards the slaves including the all too common whippings. He says, “I have often been awakened at the down of day by the most heart-rendering shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood.” One could only imagine the horrid pictures that slaves would have seen on a daily basis of other slaves nearly being beaten to death by their masters. For the black children growing up on the plantation, the master was seen to be a man of great power and not to be taken lightly. This was exactly

In the novel Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, the author uses the characters internal and external conflicts to show that everybody has chains both physically and mentally.

(3) When first reading these narratives one would often assume, by what history tells us, that slave owners were cruel, hated men who often beat slaves severely if they committed even the slightest infraction. While this depiction does stand true for some slave owners, I was surprised to find that most of the former slaves interviewed in the “Slave Narratives” often held their masters in high regards, referring to them as kind and good. Former slave Harriett Gresham even goes as far to say that her master, Mr. Bellinger was “exceptionally kind”. Many slaves in the narratives described their masters as good to his slaves and never whipping them unless it was absolutely necessary. However, when the former slaves spoke of the “paterollers”, white men who roamed the roads in search of runaway slaves often beating them and returning them to their owners, they were described as being very cruel to slaves showing no sympathy to any slave found running away from a

In the 18th centuries, when slavery expanded to the Virginia colony, variety of tasks put enslaved Afro-Americans’ labor into white-supportive management. According to ‘Virginia Slaves’ Winter Tasks, 1786-1787’, regardless of their sex, all slaves might work over to help plantation farming through threshing wheat and rye, framing barn, filling gullies for farming, cutting firewood, and digging ditches, etc. Those were all winter tasks commanded by landowners. Though the slave’s tasks were that tough, even one mistake happened with them, caused a painful punishment. Back to the diary, it shows the story of a slave named ‘Eugene’, who got whipped by his owner because of his bedwetting. The diary describes the details that how owners abusively had slaves put the bit on, keeping him to silence. What is worse, William forced him to drink his urine as penalty. However, slaves had to tend stable. That was the command from landowners, too. Because slaves had no right to protest, even if they die from “moderate correction”, the master was not prosecuted by the state government since it was legal. It was so

White explores the master’s sexual exploitation of their female slaves, and proves this method of oppression to be the defining factor of what sets the female slaves apart from their male counterparts. Citing former slaves White writes, “Christopher Nichols, an escaped slave living in Canada, remembered how his master laid a woman on a bench, threw her clothes over her head, and whipped her. The whipping of a thirteen-year-old Georgia slave girl also had sexual overtones. The girl was put on all fours ‘sometimes her head down, and sometimes up’ and beaten until froth ran from her mouth (33).” The girl’s forced bodily position as well as her total helplessness to stop her master’s torture blatantly reveals the forced sexual trauma many African females endured.

“Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.” In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs provides a portrayal of her life as a black slave girl in the 1800s. Though Harriet described herself as having yellowish brown skin; she was the child of a black mother and a white father. “I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.” Born with one drop of black blood, regardless of the status of her white father, she inherited the classification of black and was inevitably a slave. Harriet endured years of physical and mental abuse from her master and witnessed firsthand how slaves were treated based on the color of their skin. Years of abuse can only be taken for so long, like many

During this time period the slaves were allowed to leave the plantations or homes but only to run errands for the masters. While in public the slaves were expected to behave, move out of the way of whites, and never strike a white person. This was present in the book The Inventions of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd because charlotte was a slave who was allowed to go the city for goods, she one day would not move out of the way and then struck a white women, this then lead to her being taken to the work house and being punished. (Kidd. The Invention of Wings, 2014) So not only were they not allowed to react in self-defense but they were also not allowed to be taught how to read or write. If a slave were to break any of these rules then depending on the offense and where it occurred was what determined the punishment. The punishments during this time could have been getting sent to the work house which is where they whip, and force slaves to work until they have served their time or they are at the mercy of their masters. (Kidd. The Invention of Wings, 2014)The masters can do whatever type of punishment they see fit for their slaves, and there was no laws protecting them. The only thing that protected these slaves was their value to the master’s wealth. Although in reality a lot of the slave owners were actually not hostile or

“He told me that I was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing; that I was nothing but a slave, whose will must and should surrender to his…” The treatment of slaves varied in their personal experiences as well as in the experiences of others they knew, but Harriet Jacobs phenomenally described the dynamics of the relationship between many female slaves and their superiors with these words from her personal narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Before slavery was outlawed it was not uncommon for young female slaves to be sexually abused and exploited by their masters. Although many people know about the cruelty of the sexual assaults that made too many young girls victims of rape in the Antebellum South, most people are unaware of the complexity of the issue and how many different ways these women were abused.