The Longest Memory

Whitechapel is the focal character of D’Aguiar’s novel, The Longest Memory however, the author has used a great many other characters whose stories also stand-alone. Why has D’Aguiar structured his novel in this way and how does it lead the reader to an understanding of the impacts of slavery?

William Robbins’s plantation. “The boy Luke was happy. When Shavis Merle, a white man with three slaves to this name, sought to hire Luke during the harvest...for $2 a week. Merle believed in feeding his workers plenty of food, but they gave it all back in the field, from sunup to sundown, and no one that year gave up more than Luke did. After Luke died in the field, merle protested up and down about paying compensation, but Willy Robbins got him to pay Henry $100 for the boy. ‘Fair business is fair business,’ Robbins had to keep telling Merle. Moffett was early to the boy’s funeral, which Merle attended, and Moffett said some words at the gravesite, but no one said more than Elias and at the last his new wife had to put her arms around him to bring an end to all the words.” (Jones 103). Personally, this was the point in the novel where I began to get attached to Jones’s characters. This is an example of Jones’s use of imagery which is used not only show the meaning of the work, but as well as to leave an impact on the reader at the end of the chapter, which personally is why I really enjoyed this novel. Another example of imagery that Jones’s uses that leaves an impact on the reader is when when Sheriff John Skiffington shoots Mildred, Augustus’s wife, for hiding Moses, Henry’s first slave which ran

The men would punch Douglas and he would punch back, but one of the men kicked him in the eye really hard that they stopped. While this was going on, other white men were yelling “Kill the da***d ni***r! Kill him! kill him! He struck a white person.”. When they backed off Douglass tried to continue, but he knew he couldn’t. He knew that if he was killed in the fight nothing would have been done. Frederick Douglass went back to Master Hugh’s to work for him after the incident with the white men. Master Hugh’s Mistress took care of Douglass’s eye and Master Hugh did not like that and was enraged. When Douglass healed, Master Hugh ended up taking him back to Mr. Gardner's where he learned to be an experienced calker. He also got paid six to nine dollars a week, earning one dollar and fifty cents a day. The bad thing was that after Douglass got paid his full amount he would have to give all of it to Master Hugh.

2. Quite early in the novel, Douglass talks about witnessing his aunt Hester getting whipped. He says, “I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood- stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.

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

The Longest Memory is a novel by Fred D’Aguiar, which has many different underlying themes and ideas communicated through it, but all relating back to two main themes of the book. These themes are Racial Superiority and the opposing ideas of Slavery and Christian Values. The date in which this novel is set (early eighteenth century) was a brutal and a seemingly amoral time. The white population at that time had deemed it just to enslave African peoples, whom they had caught or lured onto slave ships and brought back to America. In 1861, there were 15 slave states, which agreed and consented towards enslavement.

There is so much damage happening in Douglass’ story that it is challenging to grasp how such an inhuman thing can happen not so long ago from today. Douglass illustrates how dehumanization of black slaves by the whites played a significant role in the timeline of slavery and the brutal occurrences that seemed to expand with it. Whether it was before, during, or after slavery, the slaves were dehumanized in many ways. Without dehumanizing the black slaves' society we would be unable to preserve the experience of violence in order to keep slaves thrive intact situated. But on top of that slaves were punished in extreme manners physically and mentally which this would have caused them to come to a sort of break and become a brute. Not only keeping

Slaves’ future lives all depended on who would “win” them and buy them. For Douglass, it was unbearable to observe human beings cry in desperation and pain. Frederick’s mistress was the only person, besides himself, that was able to experience pure dismay; causing them to ache together and understand the terror.

(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 one chapter of his autobiographical publication Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, the abolitionist activist Douglass shares his experience as a field hand under one white slavemaster Mr. Covey. Covey was a more volatile and violent man than Douglass was used to, who prided himself in his ability to “break negroes” through harsh lashings. Douglass recalls that hardly a week went by in which he was not whipped once. One day, he finally retaliated, seizing Covey by the throat, fighting with him, and ultimately emerging victorious from a two hour altercation. Despite his actions being violent, threatening, and rebellious, Douglass is never punished for it and in fact never whipped again for the remaining duration

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the

Whitechapel made the decision, when Chapel ran away, that he would tell his Master that his son had “taken the river path” rather than taking the usual straight north path. Whitechapel believed that if he gave up his son’s whereabouts he would be saving his son’s life. Whitechapel overestimated the master’s respect for himself. This could be due to his thinking that slaves who respect and listens to the overseers and master’s orders “earn the small kindness of the overseer and master”. It will never be known if Chapel would have made it all the way north if his father had never unzipped his lips but we do know that Whitechapel telling his master the whereabouts of Chapel definitely made the chances of him making it north very slim.

“The son heard it, though he was some way off. He heard the crack of the whip and the groans of his poor mother. The cold chill ran over him, and he wept aloud; but he was a slave like his mother, and could render her no assistance. He was taught by the most bitter experience,

Douglass also carves the vivid picture of dehumanization into the reader's minds when he writes about the whippings slaves endure. When Douglass is a young boy, he witnesses for the first time a slave getting whipped, "he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook." Douglass hides in a closet, thinking that he would be the next victim. This is Douglass's first encounter with the extreme cruelty of slaveholders. "She now stood fair for his infernal purpose...after soon rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor" (Douglass 42). As it turns out, the slave

Douglass gives detailed anecdotes of his and others experience with the institution of slavery to reveal the hidden horrors. He includes personal accounts he received while under the control of multiple different masters. He analyzes the story of his wife’s cousin’s death to provide a symbol of outrage due to the unfairness of the murderer’s freedom. He states, “The offence for which this girl was thus murdered was this: She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hicks’s baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried.” This anecdote, among many others, is helpful in persuading the reader to understand the severity of rule slaveholders hold above their slaves. This strategy displays the idea that slaves were seen as property and could be discarded easily.