Knowledge is Power

Literacy is highly important for liveration because it gives people power. Without knowledge, those who are unfortunate will be controlled by those who abuse the power of knowledge. To me, literacy is important because it opens new doors for the future, and that is liberating because I no longer have to depend on others that know things I know as well.

The power of literacy enlightens people and gives them better, more-structured perspectives of certain things, and, if they are bound to other people due to their ignorance, literacy liberates them by giving them the knowledge of freedom and the courage to fight for their beliefs. In the Narrative of Frederick Douglass, slaves are illiterate and are forced to remain that way because of the fear slaveholders have that they might rebel, as Mr. Auld told his wife, "if you give a nigger...A nigger should know nothing...there would be no keeping him...to his master." (34) Douglass realizes the strength of this power and seeks to treasure and increase it, as stated in quote, "It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled...I now understand what had beem to me a most...to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man...I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." (34) He sought to continue learning no matter what, because to gain more knowledge meant to get closer to freedom, as he said in his realization, "Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with hope...to learn to read." (35)

Literacy has freed me because it has taught me how to find the path to better opportunities. I came to this country five years ago, and I knew nothing about it; I could not speak English, had no idea what the school environment was like, and I knew no one to help me understand. So I took English lessons for a year and six months, and I learned to read English, speak it, write it, and of course, understand it, quickly.

Speaking English and learning new things helped me communicate with others. It helped me understant my lessins in school, and it made my life better. Learning as much as possible throughout my life has opened my eyes and given me interest to learn even more, making me a better person for the future.

American Slavery

The different narratives of all those slaves expands the knowledge of American slavery because they are personal experiences those people share with the world, and tell them things that they didn’t know before. Those slaves narrate new things one has not seen elsewhere. It shows how slaves were brutally treated, discriminated, forced to work hard at a young age, illiterate, etc.

In the narrative of Charity Anderson, she describes how she remembers “seeing slaves torn up by dogs and whipped unmercifully.” Slaves that didn’t obey or do poorly in their chores would be beaten and/or fed to dogs as punishment. The whippings would be so hard that most slaves would be left cruelly deformed.

Other slaves were purchased by their masters like objects in a store, as it happened to Walter Calloway. By the time Walter was ten years old, he was forced to do a grown man’s work. Most slave children are forced to work in arduous chores of the fields and outdoors from a young age, and if they did not do as asked, they would be punished just like adult slaves.

Emma Crocket learned to read a bit of printing after the emancipation, but she never learned how to read handwriting. Slaveholders weren’t allowed to educate a slave because society feared that as soon as slaves learned enough, they’d rebel against them, for most of what held them prisoners to slavery was ignorance. If a slaveholder was caught educating a slave, they’d be persecuted by the law and arrested.

Tempe H. Durham describes how female slaves and their white mistresses spun, wove, and dyed cloth on the plantation, along with more women work. Back then, neither slave nor white women were counted with importance, and they were left to do woman work. However, since female slaves were even lower than the regular women, they would be discriminated and forced to do men’s work and arduous work equally.

Clayton Holbert mentions how slaves had to wave their own clothes, butcher their own meat, and make their own maple sugar. Slaves weren’t given shoes, and small children wore the same clothes regardless of the gender. Slaveholders wouldn’t facilitate the slaves’ necessities at all.

Some slaves would be freed, but then they would unfortunately be recaptured by slave dealers and sold back into slavery. Other slaves would be made to join the Union Army during the Civil War, as Holbert’s father, brother, and uncle did.

Some slaveholders would be nice at times, like Joseph Holmes’ mistress, who did not allow her slaves to be mistreated. She raised slaves for the market, so she considered it poor business to mistreat them. It was probably nothing but convenience, but at least she gave her slaves a break.

Ben Horry talks about the poor diet slaves had. They were not fed constantly, and when they were, they were given bad food in really small quantities. He also shows how white people didn’t allow any ‘inappropriate behavior’ in slaves by talking about the punishment his father received for intemperate drinking.

Other slaves were left with absolutely nothing after slavery’s end, like Fountain Hughes and his family. He tells the reader how he and his brother had to sneak into a white family’s livery at night in order to leave the cold. He also mentions how slaves were sold at auctions like objects.

Proud Composition

The composition I believe I'm most proud of is the assignment we were asked to do a while ago. It's in the blog named, 'Amiga Soledad,' from the Humanities' Blogs.

I'm proud of this assignment because I talk about a song I really like, and I kind of translate it to English and tell people what it basically says and what it means. I think I did a good work with it. What I believe I did well is expressing what the song meant because I was specific and gave lots of details, and even used my own imagination to include some little things in the meaning. What I could have done better is study it a little deeper to find more hidden things in the song, like metaphors, I wasn't able to find any metaphors, or 'complex things,' things that require a lot of reviewing to be able to catch and understand.