The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Taylor Cole
AP- English
10-08-09
The Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
This particular story just gave you the brief over view of how hard life was for slaves. It also goes to show that just because you were a fair skinned slave doesn’t life is going to be a piece of cake. In this story we walk thru life with a fair skinned slave who from what it seemed at first had the perfect life. She soon realizes that she is a slave and life seems to go downhill from there.
After her initial slave master dies she is thrown into a situation which is out of her control. She is to live with the children in law of her old slave master and this life isn’t anywhere close to as nice as her old life. She has to adjust to a total new life of actually doing real slave work. She witnesses some of the most violent slave beatings she’s ever seen. But she indeed has to get used to this because this is the treatment slaves “deserve”.
She ends up losing her father, and she expects her mistress to let her grieve. She doesn’t understand the slave life. The simple fact of considering herself as a human being is a privilege. At any moment she can be taken away from her position in the house. She finds it very hard to live under these conditions, sometimes she might not get to eat. Luckily she had her grandmother who is a great asset to the community when it comes to food. But thru all of this she does get to encounter the evilness of the human nature of the slave master and mistress.
As she gets older other trials come her way, like her grandmother getting sold into freedom. This was a great blessing to her grandmother but in a sense it was a curse to the girl because she no longer has a source of food, nor does she have someone to run to when she needs love and understanding. And if I thought adolescence was a stretch in this day in age, than is definitely was worse for slave girls. Her becoming a woman on her own had to be a struggle. She was already a beautiful girl and her being fair skinned didn’t help. This made her master more attracted to her and this made her an easy target so that he can molest her. She had already witnessed other situations where maybe a master had took advantage of a slave girl and got her pregnant. She knows that no good will come of this but there is nothing she can do about it.
I know that this slave girl’s story is not a pity story but a informational story that will hopefully make people want to help the slaves. She even shouts out to the people living in the north at the end, people that could have possibly helped need to know the graphic story. They needed to see how it felt to be a slave every step of the way. They needed not to count the house slaves out because they did have it just as bad as any other slave in the fields.